About Corona Minister

Try out the new Corona Minister Simulation Game!  ScienceAtHome has designed a new game that puts you in the role of "Corona Minister".  As Corona Minister your job is to make difficult decisions in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, and balance public health, the economy, and the mental health and civil rights of your population.

You can try a prototype of the game here.

Before starting, please note that the underlying simulation is not intended as a scientifically supported public health model, or is it meant to make accurate predictions about the current COVID-19 epidemic. 

Rather, the purpose of the Corona Minister game is to illustrate the difficult choices facing nations across the world, and to facilitate reflection on the trade-offs of any policy. 

In the Corona Minster Game, your job is to manage the national strategy for handling the COVID-19 outbreak, and to make difficult decisions about how to balance economic, public health, privacy, and mental health outcomes.

On each outcome you can get a maximum of 5 stars, but you cannot get 5 in all of them. So do you want to focus your policies on optimizing one outcome and get all five stars, at the detriment of one or more of the other outcomes? Do you want to take a balanced approach, and maximize your total score across all outcomes? Is it better to not restrict the civil rights of your citizens, at the cost of their health? These are the kinds of decisions you must make in the game.

When we played the Corona Minister Game, we got a maximum of 15 stars. If you do better than that, you have a bright future in policy modeling - or you may have found a point at which the simulation should be extended. In either case, your input is immensely interesting and if we can get the opinions of enough citizens, perhaps we can use this to bring real government policies better in line with your considerations. Please remember that this is only a prototype of the game so bear with us and please do give us feedback or ideas at support@scienceathome.org

If you are want to explore more scientifically rigorous simulations of the health consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak, we suggest you look at e.g. Epidemicforecasting.org or Predictive Healthcare team at Penn Medicine