Risk Assessment

In response to my last post, Meaningful Numbers, I got this link from a reader. It will take you to a map that shows, on a county-by-county basis (and we all know how I feel about counties) what your chances are of coming into contact to a corona virus carrier at large in your community.

https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/

In using this tool, you should note the slide bar at the lower left, allowing you to view risk scaled to the size of the gathering you are contemplating attending. You should also note that the data assumes there are ten times as many infected people than are reported in official figures. I wouldn't have doubted that figure a few months ago, before widespread testing became available. Even now, the public's indifference to getting tested, even here in San Antonio, where testing is free and easy, leads me to think that ten times the reported figure probably isn't off by much; and it's best to err on the side of caution in this case.

If you're thinking of going where there'll be a number of other people, a place where social distancing will be difficult, unlikely or impossible, that web site will help you make an informed decision as to the risk it entails. But you should also remember that, if you go, and you're exposed, there is still the After-Time to think about: a time when you will return to the company of your loved ones, when you may yourself be the infected one, when you will be the source of illness and death for everyone around you.

Meaningful Numbers

 You see it all the time, on all the news channels: brightly coloured maps showing how many cases each state has. New York, California, Texas and Florida are dark red, because they have so many cases.

But that's not a particularly meaningful bit of information. Of course those states have the most cases: they have the most people. 

A better map would show the infestation of corona virus as a percentage of population. On that map, the dark-red states would be Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey, Alabama and Georgia; each of those states has more than 2,000 cases per 100,000 people. 

Close behind would be South Carolina, Rhode Island, DC, Nevada, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Texas, Arkanss, Delaware, Maryland, Iowa, and Illinois, each with more than 1,500 cases per 100,000 people.

California would be in the middle group, along with Nebraska, Connecticut, Idaho, Utah, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Indiana, South Dakota, Minnesota, New Mexico, Kansas and Wisconsin, each with 1,000 to 1,499 cases per 100,000.

All this shouldn't make the authorities, or the people, in Texas and California feel much better about the whole thing, but it would give a more meaningful sense of how bad things are in various states.

If you want to know where your state stands, go to https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-us-maps-and-cases/ and click the column heading "...per 100,000 people." Bear in mind, too, that the great majority of cases in the northeast -- New England, New York and New Jersey -- are cases that came up in the early stages of the pandemic, before we knew as much about how to stop the spread. 

An even more useful map would be one that showed the states' relationship based on positivity rates. Positivity rates are the best indicator of how fast the virus is spreading in an area. The worst places on that map would be Mississippi (21%), Texas (19%), Florida (17.5%), Alabama (17%) and Nevada (16%), Washington (15%) and Idaho (also 15%). You can find these statistics at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity, but I don't know where you can find an actual map to illustrate these statistics in a quickly-understandable way.