COVID-19 Risk During Thanksgiving 2020: What To Expect

How likely is it that you will meet at least one person infected with the coronavirus if you go to a bar in Denver? How about a 100-person wedding in Baltimore? Or a Thanksgiving dinner with 25 guests in Los Angeles?

The answers to these questions – and many more – can be found on the free, intuitive and now site. Peer reviewed COVID-19 Risk Assessment Planning Tool. Built by a team of Georgia Tech researchers, tool is designed to help decision makers, event planners and individuals easily understand the risks associated with gatherings of various sizes in the United States and increasingly around the world.

(And if you’re curious, as of November 9, you’d have a 78% chance of meeting someone with an active coronavirus infection at the Denver bar, a 68% chance at getting married in Baltimore, and about a 25% chance at Thanksgiving meal in Los Angeles.)

The COVID-19 Risk Assessment Planning Tool was developed in March by Joshua weitz, a quantitative biologist at Georgia Tech who wanted a simple way to quantify the risk of witnessing events of different sizes in different locations.

The first iteration was a graph that took into account the number of infections per capita in a given county, as well as the size of a proposed event. Later, this same information was overlaid on a map to make it even easier for users to understand.

To find out how likely you are to meet someone infected with coronavirus at a friend’s white elephant party, for example, all you need to do is open the tool, move the cursor to the left of the map on how many people you plan to attend (say 15), then hover your cursor over the outline of the county where the event will take place (say Santa Cruz).

The tool will tell you that if the rally took place today, there’s an 8% chance that someone will bring the virus with a pair of fancy socks.

What it can’t tell you, however, is if an 8% chance of sharing a space with someone capable of infecting you is too high to make your presence worth it.

This decision is up to you.

“In a way, it’s like a weather map,” said Clio Andris, a Georgia Tech professor of city and regional planning and interactive computing who helped Weitz 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. “

The map is updated daily with the latest information on the number of cases in each county in America. Therefore, an 8% chance of meeting an infected person on Monday could become a 12% risk by Friday.

The tool also assumes that the actual number of coronavirus cases is up to 10 times higher than what is stated in official reports, as not all cases will be detected by testing.

The COVID-19 risk assessment tool went live in July and the creators reported that 2 million people visited the site in September.

In addition to individual users, the research team was contacted by the Georgia Municipal Assn., Which represents all mayors in the state, as well as organizations like Special Olympics that used it to assess the risk of the organization’s d ‘events.

Andris used the tool herself to decide whether to attend a little party last week. She had been invited to watch the election results with four friends – a gathering of five in total – and she was worried because she hadn’t met so many people outside her home since the shutdown began. After plugging in the settings, she learned that there was a 4% chance that one of the five election observers would be infected with the virus and could pass it on to others.

A risk of 4% is low but not necessarily low enough to satisfy Andris, extremely cautious since the start of the pandemic. It wasn’t until she considered the other four friends to be teachers like her who mostly lived alone and hadn’t socialized much with others in the past eight months that she decided the risk was acceptable, at least for her. (This is information that no tool can tell you – yet).

As we move into the holiday season, Andris said she hopes more people use the COVID-19 risk assessment tool to help them make decisions about the number of local friends and families. to invite to their celebrations and on the opportunity to travel to different regions of the country. – or even in the same condition – worth the risk.

“I can see a lot of people saying, ‘It’s been a tough year and we really need to be with friends and family,” she said. “I understand that, and I hear that, but it’s going to have consequences.