Development of a Simulator to Model the Spread of Coronavirus Infection in a Closed Space

Abstract

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 and its level of infectiousness, as well as its status as a global pandemic, has led to concerns about the most effective ways to reduce the transmission rate, however predicting the effectiveness of intervention strategies in a pandemic is difficult, hence the importance of simulating and modeling for understanding the spread of the disease. In this work we designed and developed a computer simulator to enable the study of infectious diseases evolutions, the simulator imitates random movements and positions of a given number of citizens in a closed space. It takes into account several parameters: contamination ratio of the disease, contaminated ratio of population, and mask-wearing ratio. We also elaborated some experiments for studying the impact of the contamination ratio over the disease spreading, as a result for a sample of 100 citizens in a closed place, we used a combination of simulations for the aforementioned 3 parameters. The results show that there’s no significant impact of the contamination ratio of the disease over the number of contaminations per each generation, although it has an impact on the propagation speed.