This tool allows you to see the risk of COVID in your area in real time

How likely is it that someone at your Thanksgiving table has COVID? Use this tool to find out

It’s pretty safe to say that the United States has completely lost any grip it ever had on COVID-19. Infections have soared to more than 100,000 new cases a day. Over 1,000 people die every day. Hospitals in many cities are facing a critical shortage of intensive care beds. And all of this just before Thanksgiving, when, despite the pandemic getting out of hand, 40% of Americans still say they plan to travel. Cool, cool, cool.

With this horrific spike in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths just before the holidays, you might be wondering how risky your Thanksgiving and Christmas plans can be. And now there is a tool for it.

Researchers at Georgia Tech University have created a “COVID-19 Risk Assessment Planning Tool” – a map that lets you choose any county in the United States and a group size to see the likelihood that a person at that gathering or event will be infected with the virus.

Let’s look at some examples. Suppose you want to attend a 50-person wedding in Portland, Oregon. With a gathering of 50 people selected, we fly over Multnomah County, where Portland is located, and the map shows that there is currently a 41% chance that someone at this wedding has COVID-19.

Now consider a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people in Chicago. We set the group size to 10 and zoom in on Cook County, Illinois. According to the tool, there is a 29% chance that a person in this group of 10 will be infected with COVID-19, depending on the number of local cases.

The tool can be used to estimate the relative risk for just about any size of event and at any location in the country. It calculates the risk in real time using COVID case data from across the United States. It can only tell you the risk level of an activity, however – it cannot tell you if a gathering is too risky to attend. It’s up to you.

“In a way, it’s like a weather map,” said Clio Andris, professor of city and regional planning and interactive computing at Georgia Tech, who helped develop the tool. “He can tell you how likely it is to rain, but he can’t tell you if you’ll get wet. It depends on whether you are carrying an umbrella or whether you choose not to go out at all. “

We hope this tool will help put reporting into perspective for people planning to travel for the holidays this year. The place we are now in is much worse than in the spring, when there were lockdowns, or even in the summer, when a deadly second wave left tens of thousands dead.