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With Thanksgiving just two weeks away many people will being having to make tough decisions on whether to attend family gatherings, and risk COVID exposure or transmission to others.
The CDC has published recently revised recommendations for Holiday Celebrations and Small Gatherings, and while small family gatherings pose the lowest risk, they cite numerous factors - including the Community Levels of COVID-19 at the gathering location - as determining the risk degree of risk.
Since there are some areas of the country with relatively low numbers of COVID cases - the risks of gathering there (excluding the risks of exposure during travel) - are substantially lower than areas with high activity.
These levels can change quickly, however, making it difficult to know the status of a given area.
Georgia Tech has produced a remarkable solution; an interactive map that allows you to set the gathering size (10 to 5000), then hover over any county in the United States, to get the estimated risk of exposure.
Where I live, and plan to celebrate thanksgiving, it shows an 8% chance of sharing Thanksgiving with a positive COVID case with a gathering of 10 people. There are some regions of the country - particularly in the Midwest - where the risk is 10 times greater.
A paper on this project was published in Nature three days ago (see below), and several large media outlets - including the L.A. Times - have featured it in the past 24 hours.
Resource
Published: 09 November 2020
Real-time, interactive website for US-county-level COVID-19 event risk assessment
Aroon Chande, Seolha Lee, Mallory Harris, Quan Nguyen, Stephen J. Beckett, Troy Hilley, Clio Andris & Joshua S. Weitz
Nature Human Behaviour (2020)
Abstract
Large events and gatherings, particularly those taking place indoors, have been linked to multitransmission events that have accelerated the pandemic spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). To provide real-time, geolocalized risk information, we developed an interactive online dashboard that estimates the risk that at least one individual with SARS-CoV-2 is present in gatherings of different sizes in the United States. The website combines documented case reports at the county level with ascertainment bias information obtained via population-wide serological surveys to estimate real-time circulating, per-capita infection rates. These rates are updated daily as a means to visualize the risk associated with gatherings, including county maps and state-level plots.
The website provides data-driven information to help individuals and policy makers make prudent decisions (for example, increasing mask-wearing compliance and avoiding larger gatherings) that could help control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, particularly in hard-hit regions.
As a result of all of this publicity, the site is getting slammed with hundreds of thousands of visitors over the past 24 hours. I've had intermittent luck accessing the site due to this heavy traffic. Presumably this will smooth out over the next few days.
The Tool can be accessed at:
About
This site provides interactive context to assess the risk that one or more individuals infected with COVID-19 are present in an event of various sizes. The model is simple, intentionally so, and provided some context for the rationale to halt large gatherings in early-mid March and newly relevant context for considering when and how to re-open. Precisely because of under-testing and the risk of exposure and infection, these risk calculations provide furher support for the ongoing need for social distancing and protective measures. Such precautions are still needed even in small events, given the large number of circulating cases.
Contributors:
Conceptual Development
- Joshua Weitz (Georgia Institute of Technology, Biological Sciences, GT-BIOS)
- Website and Dashboard Development
- Aroon T. Chande (GT-BIOS and Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory)
- Lavanya Rishishwar (GT-BIOS and Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory)
- Walker Gussler
- Mallory Harris (Stanford Biology)
- Stephen Beckett (GT-BIOS)
- Quan Nguyen (GT-BIOS)
- Seohla Lee (Friendly Cities Lab at GT)
- Clio M. Andris (Friendly Cities Lab at GT)
- I. King Jordan (GT-BIOS)
Acknowledgements
The team thanks Richard Lenski, Lauren Meyers, and Jonathan Dushoff for input on concept development.
International Collaborations
Italy: http://datainterfaces.org/projects/covid19eventi/
How to cite
Chande, A.T., Lee, S., Harris, M., Hilley, T., Andris, C., Weitz J.S. (2020) 'Real-time, interactive website for US-county level Covid-19 event risk assessment', https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20181271v1
