LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The best way to avoid catching and spreading the coronavirus this Thanksgiving is to stay home. Public health officials and government leaders have made that clear. But if Americans do choose to travel and gather next week, and they will, several tools can help assess the risk of those choices, along with the risks of the activities they partake in.
An interactive map from researchers at Georgia Tech allows users to drill down on any county in the country and determine the risk of attending a gathering there. Just pull the slider to adjust the size of the group and it will show the percentage chance that at least one COVID-19 positive person will be present.
A gathering of 50 people in Jefferson County, for example, has a 74% chance of including someone who has the virus. Decrease the size of the gathering to 10 and the chance goes down to 24%. Increase it to 100 people and it increases to 93%.
In Elliott County in Eastern Kentucky, where the cases per 100,000 residents are more than quadruple Jefferson County, the chances of encountering a COVID-19 positive person at a gathering of 50 people is 98%.
“The intention of the tool is to promote informed behavior by providing a quantity analogous to other likelihoods that may be familiar to users (for example, weather forecasts),” researchers who developed the map wrote in Nature this month.
Clio Andris, one of those researchers, took the weather comparison further in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: “In a way, it’s like a weather map. It can tell you what the risk is that it will rain, but it can’t tell you if you’ll get wet. That depends on if you carry an umbrella, or if you choose not to go outside at all.”
Going grocery shopping in Lexington? Getting a haircut in Covington? Bowling in Bowling Green? An app from researchers at Brown University can help you measure the chances that each of those activities will result in exposure to the coronavirus.
The doctors behind the tool said they were inspired to make it after fielding questions from friends and family all summer about the safety of different activities. Now, their curious loved ones, along with everyone else in the country, can get a COVID-19 risk assessment by visiting MyCOVIDrisk.app.
The tool begins by asking what area your activity will take place in and uses local statistics on community spread to inform the risk level. Users are then asked if the activity will take place indoors or outdoors and then to specify the type of activity. Is it something like visiting a friend’s house, where a few people are typically in a small place, or going to a mall, a much bigger place with many more people? Users also insert the length of their stay, the number of other people, and an estimated percentage of people who will wear masks.
It then spits out a risk level between very low and very high. For higher risk activities, suggestions are then offered for how to be safer. For example, going to a bar for an hour with 50 people, only 30% of whom are wearing masks, is deemed “very high risk.” The tool suggests mask wearing, social distancing, limiting the amount of time in the bar, and opening windows as some of the potential ways to reduce risk.
Over the course of the past several weeks, as COVID-19 cases have spiked across the nation, public health officials have warned that small gatherings of family and friends are one of the primary drivers of the surge. And those gatherings are sure to increase next week. According to a recent survey by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, nearly 40% of Americans plan to attend a Thanksgiving gathering with more than 10 people and most say they won’t ask guests to wear masks.
The CDC has some advice about how to keep these gatherings from becoming COVID-19 spreading events. Along with the typical safety measures of masks, distancing, and hand washing, the CDC is recommending that gatherings be held outdoors. If they’re indoors, windows should be open. Guests at Thanksgiving dinner should also consider bringing their own food and dining utensils.
But the safest option this year, of course, is celebrating Thanksgiving with the people in your home who you see everyday. As Dr. Anthony Fauci told Spectrum News 1, it’s what he’s doing. “[My daughters] have made a decision for which I’m proud of them, that they would rather have a Zoom discussion and celebration together than putting the family at risk.”