Modelo de propagação da COVID-19 em ambientes fechados baseado em autômatos celulares

Abstract

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of understanding the spread of contagious diseases in confined environments, where the proximity and movement of people favor viral transmission. This work aims to develop and evaluate an epidemiological model based on a cellular automaton to simulate the spread of COVID-19 in controlled environments, taking the study by Cavalcante et al. (2021) as a reference. The reference model was understood and implemented in the C language, with the addition of a real-time visualization through the raylib library. The cellular automaton was implemented to represent an SI (Susceptible and Infected) epidemiological model based on the Moore neighborhood and on the pseudorandom movement of individuals throughout the monitored environment. The evaluation was carried out in three stages: reproduction of the experiments from the reference paper, variation of parameters, and variation of the environment layout. The results reproduced the behavior reported in the reference, confirming that both an increase in the number of individuals and in the transmission rate intensify the contagion, while reduced populations result in almost nonexistent transmission. Furthermore, keeping the population density constant, it was found that the spatial structure of the environment does not influence the final outcome of the simulation. These results show that the developed model is able to satisfactorily reproduce the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in confined environments, reinforcing the importance of social distancing as a control measure.