Modeling the Spread of Epidemics Based on Cellular Automata

Mathematical modeling is a powerful tool to study the process of the spread of infectious diseases. Among various mathematical methods for describing the spread of infectious diseases, the cellular automaton makes it possible to explicitly simulate both the spatial and temporal evolution of epidemics with intuitive local rules. In this paper, a model is proposed and realized on a cellular automata platform, which is applied to simulate the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) for different administrative districts. A simplified social community is considered with varying parameters, e.g., sex ratio, age structure, population movement, incubation and treatment period, immunity, etc. COVID-19 confirmation data from New York City and Iowa are adopted for model validation purpose. It can be observed that the disease exhibits different spread patterns in different cities, which could be well accommodated by this model. Then, scenarios under different control strategies in the next 100 days in Iowa are simulated, which could provide a valuable reference for decision makers in identifying the critical factors for future infection control in Iowa.