A simple synthetic human mobility model during COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) widespread to all corners of the world is strongly correlated to humans as the primary host. This contagious virus is transferred from humans’ close contact through a droplet or airborne transmission. Therefore, to avoid humans’ interactions, government issues regulations to restrict people’s movements, thus limiting the spreading of this virus. However, the suitable restriction scenario must be performed to minimize further problems in another aspect of people’s life such as economic impact as people have to move around to earn some money or shop for ingredients. Hence, the evaluation of the designed lockdown scenario must be performed as soon as possible. This matter raising a concern as the actual evaluation can take a longer time to be completed. To achieve a shorter evaluation period and quicker results, in this research, we aim to build a simple synthetic-based mobility model which mimics the human movement model and evaluated scenarios on this model with a computer-based simulation. We evaluated three different lockdown scenarios, namely: totalLockdown, partialLockdown, and noLockdown. The simulation results found that even though the partialLockdown scenario has a longer spreading time than the one in the totalLockdown scenario, the partial lockdown allowed relaxed constraint on people’s mobility. © 2022 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.