Covid Simulator, the video game that imagines the pandemic in the workplace

How complex can managing a workplace be during a pandemic? How hard it is to extricate yourself from changing regulations, safety rules, human error, fake news, strikes, layoffs and the many other variables that we have come to know over the past couple of years? To understand it better, there is a video game, it’s called Covid Simulator and while it may not be particularly cheerful as a theme it is exactly what it takes to get a taste of the situation.

Covid Simulator it was created using official data from the CDC US, the Center for Disease Control, and simulates quite effectively how Covid-19 spreads to the workplace. The graphic style is essential, at the levels of a Commodore 64 game (perhaps even less), but in some way it helps to give even more prominence to the content that the developers wanted to convey.

youtube: the Covid Simulator trailer

Basically we are faced with a management system classic, of those in which there is no real victory condition, only a series of more or less effective answers to contain the situation, trying to simulate plausible scenarios and playing with numbers and percentages. What if the workplace is particularly small? What if people don’t get vaccinated or are forced to work even when they are sick because there are no health plans if they stay at home? It is a free game, but by paying a few euros you can unlock some additional functions. Covid Simulator takes into account: percentage of people vaccinated, use of masks, shifts and workplaces, any suspicious deaths and even No Vax, which can be influenced by sudden disinformation campaigns.

Obviously, although accurate in some scenarios, it is good to remember that it remains a video game, designed above all to remind us how complicated the situation can be for everyone, especially for those who live in less than ideal working conditions due to ethnicity or social background, and not an official simulator to create statistical models to be applied in the workplace. However, the developer said he was very open to collaborating with virological and statisticians for improve accuracy more and more of the program.