Tea for ten? New online tool lets you calculate Covid-19 risk

© Michael loccisano
Al fresco dining in New York

If you found yourself in a group of ten today in the US capital Washington, the risk of one person having Covid-19 would be 18%. The equivalent figure in Paris is 32%.

That’s according to a dashboard developed by a team of U.S. scientists that allows people to rate the risk of attending gatherings where they live using real-time infection data.

The tool, developed by a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, provides district-level Covid-19 transmission rates for the United States and some European countries, and can be viewed here: https: //covid19risk.biosci. gatech.edu/

The team behind this publication published an article on their work in the journal Nature Human Behavior this week, where they wrote it “Provides data-driven insight to help individuals and policy makers take action. prudent decisions (eg, increasing respect for the mask and avoiding more gatherings). “

It estimates the likelihood that at least one Covid-19 positive person will be present at a given event in a given district or county, after the user enters the size of the gathering using a slide tool. .

Of course, the actual risk of transmission depends on the type of gathering – outdoor or indoor and whether masks are used – but Joshua Weitz, who co-developed the dashboard, said he got around that problem.

“It is precisely because of these factors that we deliberately focused on the question: what is the risk that one (or more) individuals will have Covid-19 during events of different sizes?

Epidemiologists believe that for every confirmed case in the United States, there are about 10 times as many that go undetected.

So the tool takes this into account, but also allows the user to lower the dial to a 5: 1 ratio as the test rates increase in some areas and it can give a more accurate response in those places.

Weitz said the model assumes a person stays positive for 10 days, and he and his colleagues plan to add more countries in the future.

It comes as US cases reach new highs, with 144,000 new cases recorded on Wednesday and hospitals under pressure.

New York State announced that all licensed establishments, including bars and restaurants, should close at 10 p.m. effective Friday. The rule will also apply to gymnasiums.

Cases are so high in El Paso, Texas, the state has requested that a military medical center be converted to accommodate non-Covid patients to free up space in hospitals.

ia-ico / mjs