Several years ago, some friends and I started playing a game called Plague, Inc. The game is a simulation of a worldwide pandemic. The gimmick is that you "play" the disease, and your goal is to wipe out the human race. You interact with the simulation by mutating the virus in various ways as the game progresses. Basically, you try to design the perfect disease to kill as many people as possible. If you manage to kill off everyone, you win!
It's actually quite difficult to "win". You're racing against time with scientists who are trying to find a cure and defeat you. You begin by choosing the location for your initial infection. From there, each time a new infection occurs, there's a chance you'll be awarded more mutation points. You use the mutation points to upgrade your disease, modifying its traits in various ways. You can add new transmission vectors (via animals, insects, water, airborne, etc...) or add new symptoms to make it more deadly or difficult to cure.
The beginner mistake is to spend all your mutations on making the disease as deadly as possible. But this tends to backfire. A disease that kills its hosts quickly fails to spread much. And it draws the attention of medical researchers earlier, giving them a faster start on finding the cure. You learn instead that transmission is the first priority. You need a disease that can fly under the radar, while still infecting as many people as possible. This works because every transmission event is an opportunity for more mutation points. So maximizing transmission is doubly effective - it gets your disease out there in the general population, and gives it more opportunities to mutate and become truly deadly.
Most games would end with a handful of countries that had closed off their borders and airports and locked down everything to prevent transmission and you would lose the game - the human race would survive via those countries. When we played it seemed like Iceland was always the stalwart holdout. Being so remote allowed them to easily isolate from your disease. But, if you could infect these countries early, you had a decent shot of winning.
Confirmed COVID-19 Cases in Iceland: 81
It's actually quite difficult to "win". You're racing against time with scientists who are trying to find a cure and defeat you. You begin by choosing the location for your initial infection. From there, each time a new infection occurs, there's a chance you'll be awarded more mutation points. You use the mutation points to upgrade your disease, modifying its traits in various ways. You can add new transmission vectors (via animals, insects, water, airborne, etc...) or add new symptoms to make it more deadly or difficult to cure.
The beginner mistake is to spend all your mutations on making the disease as deadly as possible. But this tends to backfire. A disease that kills its hosts quickly fails to spread much. And it draws the attention of medical researchers earlier, giving them a faster start on finding the cure. You learn instead that transmission is the first priority. You need a disease that can fly under the radar, while still infecting as many people as possible. This works because every transmission event is an opportunity for more mutation points. So maximizing transmission is doubly effective - it gets your disease out there in the general population, and gives it more opportunities to mutate and become truly deadly.
Most games would end with a handful of countries that had closed off their borders and airports and locked down everything to prevent transmission and you would lose the game - the human race would survive via those countries. When we played it seemed like Iceland was always the stalwart holdout. Being so remote allowed them to easily isolate from your disease. But, if you could infect these countries early, you had a decent shot of winning.
Confirmed COVID-19 Cases in Iceland: 81
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