Please stay at home this Easter

Click the image to download a copy of it.

Background

The animated GIF which brought you here was intended to convey the importance of social distancing in reducing the spread of the COVID-19 virus, especially over the Easter and/or Passover 2020 holidays in many countries, when attending religious services and visiting friends and family is customary.

Simulation

In the GIF, a hypothetical community of 100 people is simulated. 10% of the people in that community are essential workers—farmers, grocery and delivery workers, health care workers, and so on—and need to interact with members of the community. In the left hand panel, only essential workers go out to work over the Easter break, and everyone else stays at home. In the right-hand panel, just a few people who aren’t essential workers also go out during Easter to visit family and friends. You can see how much difference that makes in terms of exposing and potentially infecting other members of the community with the COVID-19 virus.

You might notice that in this case, the first exposure of an essential worker on the right-hand panel was not from one of the two initial cases but from someone who had been exposed through a nonessential contact shortly before.

Methods

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Acknowledgements

This visualisation was inspired by Steven Goodreau, Martina Morris, and others, who give a definitive answer to the question, “Can’t I please just visit one friend?”, who also provided valuable feedback.

Software

• Networks were simulated using the R package ergm and visualised using ndtv, which in turn depend on networkDynamic, network, and others.
• Point locations were generated using the package SobolSequence.
• Animations were created with R package animation and composited using ImageMagick.