Grant Sanderson has released a new 3Blue1Brown video on simulating an epidemic, in which, he presents a number of different scenarios that can affect how fast an infectious disease might spread using the math for a basic SIR epidemic model. Those scenarios include variations on the following strategies for avoiding contact with people who are carrying the SARS-nCoV-2 coronavirus, which have become familiar to many around the world:
- Identifying and Isolating detected cases,
- Social Distancing,
- Travel Restrictions,
- Rate of Infection, and
- Avoiding Central Hubs (like schools, restaurants, or grocery stores)
Here's the 23-minute video, which is well worth watching because of the insights it provides into how effective each of these strategies may be on their own.
But wait, that's not all! What if you wanted to test drive your own SIR epidemic model?
In the following 22-minute Numberphile video, Brady Haran and Ben Sparks build a SIR epidemic model from scratch using GeoGebra's online graphing calculator's capabilities, which makes the video also a "how-to" presentation for making your own epidemic model from scratch:
The GeoGebra SIR model Ben Sparks created in the video is available here. If you want to get your own Numberphile-style brown butcher paper background for your model though, you're on your own....