One-sentence brief
Outbreak models are powerful teaching tools, but visual timing, boundary assumptions, behavior categories, and intervention sequencing can create false causal impressions.
SIMULATION LITERACY
How agent-based and compartmental outbreak models can explain mechanisms without becoming medical advice, deterministic predictions, or simplistic policy proof.
ORIENTATION
Outbreak models are powerful teaching tools, but visual timing, boundary assumptions, behavior categories, and intervention sequencing can create false causal impressions.
WORKING BRIEF
A browser model can make transmission, delay, and capacity visible. It should explain the mechanism it simplifies and avoid implying that animated particles are people or that one intervention has a universal effect.
Agent-based models show local contact and heterogeneity; compartmental models show aggregate flows. Their apparent agreement may reflect shared assumptions rather than independent evidence.
Introducing an intervention midway through a single animation can make later outcomes look caused by the intervention merely because they occur afterward. Paired control cases and aligned timelines are clearer.
A single capacity line is an educational abstraction. Real capacity depends on staffing, geography, supplies, access, referral pathways, and unequal exposure.
Case definitions, testing, reporting delays, missing data, and behavior change make outbreak estimates provisional.
This page does not recommend restrictions, treatment, diagnosis, vaccination, travel rules, or emergency action. It teaches how to read model claims and find their assumptions.
COMPLETE DOSSIER
Terms are defined for this site’s evidence method, not as universal legal or clinical definitions.
RESEARCH EDITION
This page follows the public method for provenance, confidence, source independence, alternative accounts, limitations, review state, and visible correction.
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