MapLab: An Actionable Map of Covid Risk
Conflicted would-be socializers can get a grip with a new Covid-19 risk mapping tool from Georgia Tech.
Wherever Covid-19 continues to spread, the prudence of social gatherings weighs on quarantine-weary people. With more than 20 million global recorded cases, the chance of an RSVP turning into a super-spreader event clearly isn’t zero. But what about a small group? What about in your community?
Built by virus modelers and GIS experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a mapping tool offers some answers to would-be socializers in the U.S. For all counties nationwide, the model calculates the chances that at least one person at a potential covening is carrying the coronavirus, depending on the number of people and the area where it’s located. Using data from the Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project, the model assumes that there are ten times the number of cases being reported by health departments, an “ascertainment bias” that users can adjust to 5 — a nod to the level of uncertainty in the country’s Covid case data. Users can select the size of their group and see the rough odds of running across infection.