This simulator makes a lot of simplifying assumptions about how disease spreads in the population. 1
The R0, death rate and immunity duration, along with individuals’ degree of susceptibility, ability to infect others and average time for which they’re infectious, are assumed to be uniform across the population and over time. In real life, those values would differ depending on individual and societal circumstances.
The simulation starts with five infected individuals and a total population of 10,000 people.
The average infectious period is assumed to be 14 days (around 7 percent chance of recovery every day), regardless of whether it ends in recovery or death.
There is no geographic component to how disease spreads: Individuals are equally likely to infect anyone in the population.
Individuals don’t change their behavior once infected (i.e., they don’t stay home or take other precautions that could reduce the number of people they expose).
The effective contact rate stays constant even as some individuals die. So individuals are encountering the same number of people each day even as the living population shrinks.
No new people are ever added, even though some die.
If the infection ends (zero people are infected), it doesn’t recur, meaning it’s not introduced again by an outsider being added to the population or some other mechanism.