SEIR Flu Simulation

Infectious diseases can spread with alarming speed in close-contact environments like schools. This project aimed to answer a critical question, inspired by real-world observations from a kindergarten teacher: how quickly can the flu spread in a classroom, and what is the real impact of vaccination?

To find the answer, I developed a continuous-time SEIR model from scratch. A critical first step was grounding the simulation in reality. I sourced, cleaned, and synthesized public data from the CDC's 2023-2024 flu season to accurately calibrate the model's parameters, ensuring the final simulation was not just theoretical but based on real-world conditions.

The simulation produced stark results: in an unvaccinated classroom, the flu spread so rapidly that the entire class was infected within 20 days. The model with vaccination, however, showed a significantly slower and less severe outbreak. To bring these insights to life, I built an interactive Python widget that allows users to adjust variables like vaccination rates and see the impact in real-time. This transforms a complex differential equation model into a useful, hands-on framework for understanding the powerful impact of vaccination in close-contact environments.