What’s your risk in a crowd?
Online tool assesses chance of infected person in group
There’s a 22% chance that in a crowd of 10 people gathered in Delaware County at least one person is infected with COVID-19, according to an online risk assessment tool created by Georgia Tech University.
And a crowd of 100? Make that risk 92%.
The county had made it through the initial wave of the coronavirus. Despite a small increase following the July Fourth holiday, daily cases numbers were down from the highs of April that surpassed 200.
Businesses were reopening. Most schools were making plans to welcome students back into classrooms in the fall.
A lot has changed since then. Delco, as well as the rest of Pennsylvania, has seen a resurgence of the pandemic. County and state daily case counts have soared to new heights.
And with the increasing number of cases, the risk of groups containing someone who is infected has grown substantially.
Georgia Tech’s online tool aims to shed some light on just how serious that risk is. It provides data on the chances that at least one person has COVID-19 in crowds of
different sizes, with county-specific data available for crowd sizes of 10 to 10,000.
The numbers for Berks, not surprisingly, have worsened.
The online tool assumes there are five times more cases than official cases counts show. That number could be as high as 10 times higher depending on the availabil
ity of testing in a given area.
The tool, which updates frequently as new data is collected, can be viewed at covid19risk. biosci.gatech.edu.