Get Rid of Thanksgiving With This Interactive COVID Risk Map
If you’re still planning on going to any personal Thanksgiving event, also known as COVID, I’m not going to judge you. However, I will do everything in my power to convince you that you are making the wrong decision, including referring you to the handy COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool map to give you a better understanding of your chances. … …
This map doesn’t have the most attractive names, but it is an incredibly useful tool you can use to understand how safe it is to spend time in groups that include more than just you and your housemates. And this is not just a recommendation like “pie in the sky”, “you might not want to.” The site looks at your county’s official COVID infection data, usually updated the day before, and uses it to estimate the likelihood that at least one person at your event will carry COVID.
So, for example, if I drive up to my Santa Clara County, California, I can immediately see the current level of risk – as measured by the site – for a typical meeting of 50 people. All I have to do is find my county on the map and hover over with the mouse:
I can then use the slider on the left side of the site to indicate how many people will attend the upcoming event. So, for example, let’s say I’m thinking of going to Thanksgiving with 10 people. This is how this level of risk changes:
Not bad. That’s seven out of a hundred chances that at least one person will have COVID on Thanksgiving. I’m not going to dinner anyway, but good to know. And if I lived where COVID is much more severe, such as North Dakota, I would barricade myself in my home:
One feature of the site is that it suggests there are about five times more cases of COVID than are actually reported. This is contrary to worldwide modeling research , so don’t let your relatives pull out the “fake news” card when you show them that this site says you will die if you go to Thanksgiving. (I’m hyperbolic, but not that much .)
If you have reports that your county is potentially underreporting COVID cases, you can click a little radio button on the site that changes this Establishment Offset from a 5: 1 to 10: 1 ratio. So yes, you have a little control over the data. , which makes the site as useful as your settings. That said, it’s still a great way to quickly test how safe a quick chat with a friend can be (don’t) versus, say, attending a personal sporting event (please, please don’t).