Simulation of Deconfinement Strategies — LauzHack Against COVID-19

06 Apr 2020 . category: Side . Comments
#hackathon #simulation

In April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I participated in the LauzHack Against COVID-19 hackathon — a 72-hour remote event bringing together people who wanted to contribute to the pandemic response.

Our team was a wonderfull mix: a group of computational scientists and a vet — Didier Bieler, Florence Le Sueur, Romain Vandemeulebrouck, Cécile Le Sueur, Laurent Colbois, and myself.

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We built on top of the stunning epidemic simulator created by 3Blue1Brown — all credit for the original concept goes to the 3Blue1Brown team and the developers of Manim, the mathematical animation library that powers it. That original work is simply remarkable.

Our contribution was to extend the simulator to explore deconfinement strategies: what happens when you progressively reopen different segments of the population? We modelled scenarios such as phased reopening by age group, facility-specific reopenings (schools, markets), alternating confinement cycles triggered by infection thresholds, and multi-regional policy timing differences. The goal was to provide intuitive visualizations that could make these complex tradeoffs more legible for a general audience.

The project was implemented in Python using the Manim animation library. You can find the full submission on Devpost.

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