COVID 19- Warning
In the Logic of Failure, the game simulation replicates political power in towns and how exercising that power affects the common people. In the issue with Tanaland, every population contains a carrying capacity. Factors like food supply, water source, and medical aid can affect how much a population is able to handle before a population declines. It’s interesting to read how the Tsetse fly affected the Southern African population because the biology lab I currently work in tests on tsetse flies. The tsetse fly can be carriers of a parasite that causes African Sleeping sickness in mammals. We test certain genes to mutate to determine if it would cause less transmission of the disease. A question my lab and our partner labs have asked is how would discovering the gene that affects transmission affect the population of cattle and humans in Africa? We would first have to find the gene that affects transmission but it is important to ask what would we do with that information once we have discovered it.
I’d be interested to see if a simulation like this could show the events leading to an outbreak, like the pandemic were currently living in. A simulation like this could have the option of being the highest power (president of the United states) or something below it like a senator or governor. I would like to see how many would react upon knowing about the virus initially and what decisions would be made to combat the outbreak. I wonder if people would keep the decisions that many governors have made of ordering a mandatory curfew and lockdown of the state. It would be nice to see if there was a possibility to have prevented this virus from becoming the pandemic that it has to be able to prevent it from happening again in the future.
I love how a part of the reading relates to your current research! I’m also glad that you mention the implications of finding these genes. Asking questions now can start the critical thinking process of how to effectively help African people and mammals and provide a long-term solution.
I think a simulation for a situation like the current pandemic would be really interesting. It would be hard to completely show public opinion and reactions to the decisions made by politicians because people do not act rationally. Therefore, I think that what actions the simulation would show as the correct response may not necessarily be the way the government should handle it. However, the option for a simulation would still be helpful in this situation.
I really enjoyed your post and liked how you tied it back to Coronavirus. It would be very interesting to see if we were to place this into a simulation and see the effects that different decisions would have on the US people.
I think a simulation related to the pandemic would be fascinating, especially because so much of this seems preventable in terms of how fast countries or states mandated quarantine or shutdown nonessential businesses.
I think that a simulation could allow researchers to think about how to deal with this issue in the long run. We have not experienced a pandemic like this in quite some time. Although I think a simulation would be hard to run/implement, it would be interesting to view the effects and try to come up with how to deal with the short run issue in order to try and also combat the long run problems/consequences of the pandemic.