Dense metro areas like New York City and Los Angeles were among the hardest hit in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it wasn’t long before the disease moved beyond urbanized regions and inundated America’s small towns.

To simulate how COVID-19 spreads through smaller communities and how interventions such as vaccinations and mask-wearing affect the spread of the virus, Johns Hopkins researchers have developed an interactive online platform called “Anytown, USA.”

Anytown, USA is an extension of the Delineo Disease Modeling Project at Johns Hopkins, a multidisciplinary endeavor that aims to create news tools for modeling the spread of pandemics.

Anton Dahbura, associate research scientist in the Department of Computer Science, said the idea for the simulator came from watching the pandemic evolve in his own hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland, and seeing how COVID-19 impacted such smaller towns and communities differently than it affected Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, despite being only an hour away.

“We recognized that the way COVID-19 spreads in small and rural towns is different than how it spreads in large cities, or college towns, or even resort towns. People thought, it’s not going to come here, but in reality, it’s just a matter of time before it spreads everywhere, similar to the flu,” said Dahbura, who is a member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute of Assured Autonomy, as well as the executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute.