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Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for the Washington Post, flagged a “vital” illustration about social distancing this week that he believes will “save lives.”
Apparently, readers agree, considering the “virtually unheard of” number he says clicked on it.
The Post’s Harry Stevens created a series of animated graphics depicting a fake disease he called “simulitis,” which spreads when a sick person comes into contact with a health person.
He ran the simulator for four different scenarios: free-for-all, attempted quarantine, moderate social distancing and extensive social distancing. The differences, as you might expect, were vast.
Here’s the worst-case scenario — the free-for-all:
From there, the bouncing balls slow in each case.
The attempted quarantine worked for a bit, but then fell apart. “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective,” one Georgetown University professor told the Post.
Social distancing, if people stick to it, works much better, and the best that we can hope for, in terms of flattening the curve, is to take that approach to the extreme.
Here are the resulting graphs:
“Simulitis is not COVID-19, and these simulations vastly oversimplify the complexity of real life,” Stevens explained. “Yet just as simulitis spread through the networks of bouncing balls on your screen, COVID-19 is spreading through our human networks — through our countries, our towns, our workplaces, our families. And, like a ball bouncing across the screen, a single person’s behavior can cause ripple effects that touch faraway people.”
In a sobering reminder, one researcher pointed out a critical difference between the fake disease and the real one. “If you want this to be more realistic,” he said, “some of the dots should disappear.”
Click here to get the full simulation, which the Washington Post brought out from behind it’s paywall “so that all readers have access to this important information.”
There are now 183,356 cases of COVID-19 around the world and at least 7,166 people have died, according to the latest tally from Johns Hopkins University. More than 79,000 people have recovered. In the U.S., 4,661 people have been sickened by the disease and at least 85 have died.
Read: How one expert sees the pandemic playing out over the next week, month and year
