Researchers have created an interactive tool that calculates your chances of meeting someone with COVID-19 based on your location and the number of people present at a gathering.
The tool displays a county-by-county breakdown of your coronavirus risk in real time.
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With Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, Americans are reflecting on the risk they’re willing to take to spend time with loved ones.
To help you with this assessment, researchers at Georgia Tech have created an interactive tool that calculates the risk for you.
A study released on Monday describes the tool, which can tell you the likelihood that you will encounter at least one person infected with COVID-19 at a rally, depending on your location and the size of the group.
According to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, indoor gatherings are behind the unprecedented coronavirus outbreak in the United States. So, ideally, people should avoid close contact with people outside their homes to reduce their risk of contracting the coronavirus.
But if you’re planning on seeing your friends and family anyway over the holiday season, the risk assessment tool can give you an idea of how much risk you’re taking. The numbers are updated in real time, so your risk may change from day to day.
“It gives people a way to imagine themselves in a situation and be able to decide whether or not to go to the event,” said Clio Andris, professor of urban planning at Georgia Tech and co-author of the new study, at Business Insider. .
Suppose you are planning a dinner with nine other guests on Friday. If you are in New York City, the tool shows that you have at least a 12% chance of sharing air with an infected person. But if the party is in Chicago with a group of the same size, the risk jumps to over 50%.
The risk depends on the size of the gathering and your county
To use the tool, first select the size of your gathering – between 10 and 5,000 people. Next, you will be prompted to place your cursor over the US county where your gathering will be held.
The probability that an infected person is present is indicated on a scale from 0% to 100%. The data behind the calculations is updated every day, Andris said, based on the daily case counts collected by The New York Times.
A screenshot of Georgia Tech’s COVID-19 risk assessment tool map.
COVID-19 Risk Assessment Tool
The tool shows how the risk can be different from county to county: the higher the number of cases per capita, the higher the risk. The risk also increases as the groups get larger.
On Friday, for example, there is an 89% chance that an infected person will be at a gathering of 10 people in Norton County, Kansas. Compare that to 11% for a party of the same size in Monroe County, New York.
A screenshot of the risk of coronavirus in Norton County, Kansas on Friday.
COVID-19 Risk Assessment Tool
The tool also attempts to account for asymptomatic carriers that the COVID-19 test might miss. According to Andris, the researchers introduced an item into their calculations called “verification bias,” which is an estimate of the number of actual coronavirus cases per documented case. They based the estimate on a July study that compared the total number of people who tested positive to the total number of people with antibodies (which indicates they had previously been infected) at 10 sites across the United States.
The tool offers two ‘verification bias’ options: Users can ask the tool to assume that the actual number of coronavirus cases in the United States is five or 10 times higher than the official figures. The latter option is probably more accurate, according to an August report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Higher verification bias also results in increased risk.
A “ decision support system ”
What the tool can’t do, the study authors said, is let a user know how likely they are to be infected during a rally. Rather, it is designed as a “decision support system that allows individuals to measure the risk of their own actions and plan accordingly,” they wrote. “
Andris helped tool creator Joshua Weitz get the dashboard up and running in July. Weitz’s inspiration came from his desire to determine the likelihood that a person infected with COVID-19 was at an Atlanta United FC football game this winter, before the team played their last game on March 11. .
By September, more than 2 million people had visited the site.
Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images
Andris even used it to decide to visit three friends near her home in Fulton County, Georgia on election night. The tool indicated that the risk at that time was 3%.
“It was my first time indoors with friends since March,” Andris said, adding, “the risk was minimal, but it’s not something I would do every night or every week.”
In fact, she said, Andris is probably planning a “Thanksgiving guy” this year, even though she hasn’t seen her family in Washington DC in eight months.
She hopes other vacationers will also use this tool to inform their decisions.
“We know this has been a tough year for people, we really want to come together and see each other,” said Andris. “But we hope people will use this tool to reassess their plans.”
