Better Understand Your COVID Risk With This App
We all have to make judgments about which activities we can participate in today and which should be discarded. But the new application simplifies these decisions: whether shopping in a store, a party with friends or working out, MyCovidRisk help you find out how high the probability that you will encounter with the coronavirus.
In my opinion, the smartest thing this app does is ask you for your location. (Right now, this only works in the US.) Your risk of contracting COVID-19 depends a lot on how much coronavirus is around you – a fact that is easy to forget if you just think about safety as a result of the actions you take. take. A family meeting can have a completely different level of risk if it takes place in the center of a hotspot compared to an area where cases and positive rates are very low.
A tracker created at Brown University asks several questions about the activity in question. Let’s say I want a haircut. I go into a salon, a hairdressing salon, 30 minutes, and I wonder how many people there will be. (Let’s say 10.) Then the question arises, how many people will be wearing masks. People in my area are pretty good at this, so I use 90% just in case. The app informs me that this is a “medium risk” activity in my area.
Then there is a button to reduce your risk, where you can specify, for example, what kind of mask you will wear. You also have the option to tweak some options, such as reducing the amount of time you will be there. If I say that I will wear the N95 and wash my hands frequently, I get a low risk rating.
This risk management tool is not a guarantee of anything and cannot account for all the variables that increase or decrease your risk. But it’s a pretty good start, and it explains some of the things we now know about how the coronavirus appears to be aerosolized . For example, the size of the room and the type of ventilation matter.
If the desired action is not available in the tool as a preset, you can also create your own by specifying the size of the space. I started a few of my routine tasks through the app. Sometimes I go to the gym; I got “medium risk” with a preset and “low risk” when I entered more specific data. Walking in the fresh air without a mask, but unlikely to meet many people, is rated “low”. On the other hand, visiting family – without a mask, indoors, even some of us – is rated “high risk,” which I would say is true unless you know how likely other people were to be exposed.