With upcoming travel for the holidays in the middle of a pandemic, A Georgia Tech map that calculates the risk of being around someone with COVID-19 is getting a lot of attention.
Taking risks is a part of life, and when it comes to the coronavirus, we want that risk to be minimal. The Georgia Tech Event Risk Assessment Planning tool uses COVID case data and population numbers for counties to calculate the chances that a person with COVID will be around, depending on the number of people in one space. So, the chances of a person with COVID-19 being at a 10 person event in Fulton county for example is about 18 percent. If it's 100 people that chance goes up to 86 percent.
"So what we want to do is help people understand the risk of people who come in from out of town so they can check what the rates are at their Friends and family origin, or we can understand the risk of where we're going," said Clio Andris, part of the research team that developed the tool.
Andris says the risk map is getting hundreds of thousands of visits a week now as the holiday season approaches. However, she says, it does not take into account mask wearing and social distancing—all of which lower the risk of contracting Covid-19 as well.