Should I stay home?

Germany currently is the 5th hardest-hit country worldwide by cases of COVID-19. As states such as Bavaria enter their fourth week of quarantine, one may start to wonder whether lockdowns are sensible at all. To avoid such misconceptions and educate the broad public on the impact staying at home can have, we created a website in which the user can enter their city and modify a social distancing factor to obtain the number of lives saved.

A social distancing factor of 0% corresponds to the worst-case scenario where people go on their days as usual, visiting restaurants, concerts, parties, and other social gatherings. Conversely, a factor of 100% recreates the conditions observed in countries that have undertaken harsh lockdown measures (e.g. China). As the slider is moved to the right, the difference in fatal COVID-19 cases is shown to the user as the number of lives spared.

We believe that combining a very intuitive to use website with an approach favoring positive reinforcement has a much greater potential to change a societies’ behavior than its draconian counterpart: using fear, panic, and death counts to coerce people into confinement. If interested, the user can access an explanatory page detailing our mathematical ansatz or ways one can integrate social distancing in their lives in a healthy manner. Our first prototype used Matlab’s App Designer to create an interactive SIR Model as a proof of concept, from which we derived our algorithm that is attached to this project submission. In order to be able to execute it in a browser, we used a JavaScript Ordinary Differential Equation solver.

The first big hurdle turned out to be finding the right model for the simulation running in the background, since we had to take the very short span of time allotted to us into account – time which we had to balance with accuracy. The biggest challenge, however, was setting the REST API up so that it could interact with JavaScript code. Since we had never built a web application, we had to learn a lot from scratch. Nonetheless, tinkering around with the API allowed us to integrate Fusionbase’s dataset into the website.

Besides being an innovative concept, we are proud to have made “Should I stay home?” be based on real-time data precise down to the city level. In the future, we plan on extending its ambition by working with datasets that go beyond Germany, opening it to anyone, anywhere.