The fight against Coronavirus can't be won by individuals. Only if all of society works together and adheres to agreed restrictions as a collective can the virus be contained. The restrictions we agree to ("lockdowns" in many cases) have a firm scientific basis. In fact, what is quite revolutionary of the current crisis is that a lot of decisions are largely expert-driven, instead of politically-driven. The situation is so rapidly evolving and so deadly, there's just no time for political wrangling. But that means that a lot of the motivation behind measures being taken are only truly understood by those with some scientific background; for a large part of the population, it is very difficult to understand why it's so urgent to take these drastic measures. There is a danger, certainly on the longer term, that without a good understanding by the general public the buy-in to these restrictions is lost. And with it our chances of containing the virus. Much of the information available to the public is extremely dense and hard to comprehend, while also very fragmented across many sources. Articles in "the news" are science-heavy and abstract to most readers. There is nothing wrong with this information, but it does not reach everyone. The situation is also rapidly evolving, with new (proposed) measures and tactics being discussed almost daily. It is hard to keep up with what these all mean and attempt to achieve. We propose a platform (website and/or app) that presents some of this information in an engaging interactive dashboard and on a level of complexity accessible to most. This would be by means of simulations with a limited number of tunable parameters. Various "lockdown" measures and tactics, presented in familiar terms to the general public, could be simulated and effects of different scenarios compared. Simulations would be in simple forms, e.g. "billiard balls" [https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/] or (relatively) simple graphs [http://www.r2d3.us/covid-19/]. Various other examples are also listed in this article [https://towardsdatascience.com/covid19-top-7-online-interactive-simulations-curated-fa4282889875]. The listed links demonstrate that there are several good sources available with intuitive and interactive simulations. We think our solution can differentiate itself from the rest by exhibiting:
- Interactivity in understandable terms.
- Balance in complexity: Realistic & real-world relatable, but accessible to the layman.
- Scenario comparison.
- Flexibility of the underlying model and infrastructure for extensibility with new or updated models and features.
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