Communicable disease pandemic: a simulation model based on community transmission and social distancing

Soft comput. 2023;27(5):2717-2727. doi: 10.1007/s00500-021-06168-4. Epub 2021 Aug 31.

Abstract

Communicable disease pandemic is a severe disease outbreak all over the countries and continents. Swine Flu, HIV/AIDS, corona virus disease-19 (COVID-19), etc., are some of the global pandemics in the world. The major cause of becoming pandemic is community transmission and lack of social distancing. Recently, COVID-19 is such a largest outbreak all over the world. This disease is a communicable disease which is spreading fastly due to community transmission, where the affected people in the community affect the heathy people in the community. Government is taking precautions by imposing social distancing in the countries or state to control the impact of COVID-19. Social distancing can reduce the community transmission of COVID-19 by reducing the number of infected persons in an area. This is performed by staying at home and maintaining social distance with people. It reduces the density of people in an area by which it is difficult for the virus to spread from one person to other. In this work, the community transmission is presented using simulations. It shows how an infected person affects the healthy persons in an area. Simulations also show how social distancing can control the spread of COVID-19. The simulation is performed in GNU Octave programming platform by considering number of infected persons and number of healthy persons as parameters. Results show that using the social distancing the number of infected persons can be reduced and heathy persons can be increased. Therefore, from the analysis it is concluded that social distancing will be a better solution of prevention from community transmission.

Keywords: COVID-19; Community transmission; GNU Octave; Number of healthy; Number of infected; Simulation; Social distancing.