This is a generic exponential growth pandemic simulator.

Please note that this was written by a software developer and not an epidemiologist. It's not intended to be used for any sort of serious public policy planning. It is rather intended to be a tool for people to get some sense of how exponential doubling goes. It was initially written during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic for the author to be able to have some personal idea of when a major crisis would occur.

Please especially note that this tool doesn't do any complex modeling of an epidemic over time. In a real epidemic, as the infected population increases, people will self-isolate and measures will be taken to e.g., reduce public events. This will slow the spread of the disease in reality, but this tool makes no attempt to model any of that.

pandemic_simulator

The following options are supported:

The start date, in format YYYY-MM-DD. If the initial population is more than one, this will be run back at the calculated increase rate to find patient one and start the simulation from there.

The end date, in format YYYY-MM-DD. The date to end the simulation if the --infected ceiling is not ever achieved.

The starting infected population.

Output information daily instead of weekly

Number of days it takes for the infected population to double

The mean time in days for a hospital stay.

The rate at which infected patients are hospitalized, as a multiplier (i.e., ".1" is "10%"). Patients go into the hospital at this rate, stay for mean-hospital-stay days, then at the end of that time, hospitalized-death-rate of them die, and the rest are discharged.

The rate at which hospitalized patients die at the end of their stay, as a multiplier (i.e., ".1" is "10%")

The total number of people who have ever been infected

The total number of people currently in the hospital

The total number of people dead

MIT