Simulating Sars-CoV-2 Transmission in the New York Subway

The impact of the spread of the virus on public transport has been a topic of disagreement. Some sources report that travel times are so small that contagion is insignificant, while others claim that the NYC subway was a major contributor to the spread of the virus in 2020. This study addresses this question. While there is an enormous amount of data, it is impossible to know when people got infected. Our approach is to use a model for the virus transmission to simulate contagion during travel, while using data from the turnstiles to make our simulation scenarios realistic. We combine the ghost model for train dynamics and a stopped Continuous Time Markov Chain (CTMC) for the virus transmission to create a hybrid simulation. Preliminary results indicate that our simulation tool may provide accurate answers to the question. In particular, it helps analyze the resulting risk under different transportation policies.