epidemiology model

How quickly does a virus like coronavirus spreads in the population ?

I wrote an Epidemiology (SIR) model in R to simulate the spread of any contagious disease.

The model assumes a population of 1 million healthy individuals and we introduce one infected person to the population. Every infected person interacts with at max 7 people in a day. The symptoms of the virus need 5 days to be identified and 12 days for a full recovery. (Based on data for H1N1)

Take a look at the output visualization of the model.

Inference - 1. It takes about 17 days for the entire population to be infected. 2. The virus is most spread at about 16 days. 3. At about 20 days, the recovered, susceptible and infected population is roughly the same. 4. 45 days into the epidemic the population is fully recovered !!!

Real-world simulations use many more parameters like births, deaths, immigration, quarantine, vaccination to simulate such scenarios. This is just a basic model to give us an idea on how quickly epidemics spread.