As Thanksgiving approaches, interactive coronavirus tracker can identify risks, by county and gathering size

CLEVELAND, Ohio – I hope you’ve heeded the warnings of several health experts and canceled this trip to join in the traditional y’all-come feast of your extended family.

As the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths continues to peak across the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges Americans to stay home and not congregate with other people outside of their immediate focus to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

But if you need the extra ammo to convince a pouting Aunt Tillie why you’re smart not to take a Thanksgiving visit, point her to the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool, developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Using this dashboard, you can calculate the county-level risk that your dinner will include someone with COVID-19. It takes into account the location of the event – by any US county – and the potential size of the Thanksgiving gathering.

The tracker includes a scroll bar that allows users to select the size of their family dinner. Hover the mouse over the relevant county and you will see the risk level associated with that location and the number of guests.

According to Georgia Tech’s risk assessment tool, a gathering of 20 people in Cuyahoga County had a 41% risk of including someone with COVID-19. The risk level is almost 60% for a 20-person event in Chicago and 50% for Indianapolis.

Columbus and Miami, Florida both had a 42% risk factor. All figures are as of November 22.

Asymptomatic or presymptomatic people who are unaware they are infected with coronavirus account for more than 50% of COVID-19 transmissions, according to the CDC.

The Georgia Tech “Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool” has been tracking the pandemic for months, but it added the level of risk for gatherings of different sizes by county in July, according to the university.

“The Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool takes the number of cases reported in the last 14 days in each county and multiplies it by a subtest factor to estimate the number of cases in traffic in a particular county, ”said Joshua Weitz. , professor at the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences. Weitz, one of the planning tool’s contributors, spoke for an article on the Georgia Tech website.

The Risk Assessment Planning Tool is updated daily with information from the New York Times case tally and covidtracking.com dashboard. According to Georgia Tech, these two dashboards are compiled from confirmed cases of COVID-19 from state departments of public health.

There are several other online dashboards that also track the spread of the virus locally and nationally. They are run by individual states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, universities such as Johns Hopkins, and national media including the Washington Post.

Experts warn that pandemic trackers like Georgia Tech’s Risk Assessment Planning Tool can give people a false sense of security, especially if they are relying on only one website.

Peter Zimmerman, professor of pathology at Case Western Reserve University, who oversees Case Western Reserve University’s COVID-19 dashboard, said people who consult a tracker still need to weigh the risks of contracting the disease themselves. .

“It gives a basic idea of ​​the incidence of recent cases,” he says. “People have to make decisions based on their own comfort with the level of risk.”

Since its launch in August, the CWRU dashboard, called COVID-19 Predict, has received visitors from 48 countries and around 12,000 visits since its launch. “People are obviously curious about how things are going,” Zimmerman said.

The CWRU dashboard also provides county-level information across the United States. It also provides projections of case trends five days into the future, Zimmerman said.

The team behind CWRU’s COVID-19 Predict dashboard has recently expanded to include more students, he said. The extra hands are working to expand the capacity of the COVID-19 tracker to countries around the world, Zimmerman said.