BME 210 Biomedical Computer Simulation Methods Homework 5: Spread of Disease

Homework 5: Spread of Disease Part 1 This report will model the spread of diseases throughout populations. As a disease spreads through a population, individuals become infected and the disease enters an incubation pe ...

Homework 5: Spread of Disease Part 1 This report will model the spread of diseases throughout populations. As a disease spreads through a population, individuals become infected and the disease enters an incubation period where individuals do not show symptoms. After the incubation period, individuals become infectious and begin spreading the disease to others until they recover. After somebody recovers, they might become immune for a period, which means they can no longer become infected during that period. This process is stochastic, which means that the number of individuals who become infected has a level of randomness. In this report, I will use the following parameters: the number of individuals in the population (n), the incubation period of the disease (range from a1 to a2), the recuperation period (range from b1 to b2), the immunity period (range from c1 to c2), the average disease transfer rate (DT_avg), the number of healthy individuals without immunity (nh), the number of infected individuals (ni), the number of contagious individuals (nc), and the number of healthy individuals with immunity (nhi). For each of the four scenarios described below, I will run a simulation over a certain number of days (nd) and run a specified number of simulations of each scenario (nsim). The first scenario is based on H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel War of the Worlds. In this novel, Wells kills off the Martians with the common cold, which the Martians cannot fight with their alien immune systems. In this scenario, I will model five simulations over a sixty-day period to show how quickly all Martians become infected. In this scenario, the recuperation period is very long, so the Martian population never reaches the immunity period, allowing all Martians to become infected. The next scenario is a more realistic model of a human population (n=1000). In this scenario, I will model how the disease spreads through the population with graphs displaying nh, ni, nc, and nhi over the course of 500 days as well as a histogram showing the number of individuals in each category at the end of 500 days. The third scenario introduces a vaccine or other mechanism to have some of the population be immune to the disease, which will slow the spread of the disease over time. In this scenario, the number of simulations where the disease dies off completely is much higher than the second scenario. The final scenario is similar to the second scenario, except that the recuperation period for the disease has a much narrower window, meaning individuals stay infectious for much longer on average. This causes there to be significantly fewer scenarios where the disease dies off (in my study, none of the simulations produced a run where the disease died off). Part 2 Simulation Study 1 Code for the War of the Worlds simulation: clear all;close all;clc; % input parameters n=100; % number of martians a1=5; a2=10; b1=10000; b2=20000;