SimCOVID: An Open-Source Simulink-Based Program for Simulating the COVID-19 Epidemic

Ismael Khorshed Abdulrahman

An essential part of minimizing the spread of the virus is to monitor, track, and estimate the final size of the pandemic. This is extremely useful for decision making against the public health crises [6] . One way to predict the dynamic spread of the epidemic is by the use of computer simulation following the mathematical model of an epidemic. In the literature, several analytical approaches have been proposed to model the pandemic including Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model [6] [7] , Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Removed (SEIR) model [1], Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Dead (SIRD) model [8, 9] , and fractional-derivative SEIR [10] , and SEIRD [11] . While some recent studies are addressing this epidemic using the aforementioned models [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] , there is an increasing need to develop an open-source computer program to perform a time-domain simulation of the dynamic spread of the virus.