BETTER ODDS
Risk of encountering COVID continues 5-month decline
The chance of at least one person in various sizes of gatherings in Montgomery County having COVID-19 has dropped over the past five months, according to an online risk assessment tool created by Georgia Tech University.
Georgia Tech’s online tool aims to shed some light on how serious the risk is of coming across someone with COVID-19. 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 tool uses county-level COVID-19 case data and assumes there are three times more cases than official case counts show.
According to the tool, if a group of 15 people gather in Montgomery County there’s a 11 percent risk that at least one of them has COVID-19. That number is more than half of the 30 percent risk reported in early December.
The risk for larger groups has also declined over the last five months.
The tool reports that for a group of 50 there’s a 31 percent chance at least one person has COVID-19, down from 69 percent in December. And for a group of 100 the risk is 53 percent, down from a near-certain risk of 91 percent five months ago.
Once the crowd size hits 500, the tool reports, it is assured that at least one person has COVID-19.
That was also the case in December.
While the Montgomery numbers are better than they were during the fall and winter surges, they’re a long way off from where they were last summer.
Last July, the risk in a group of 10 people was just 6 percent. The risk in a group of 50 was just 25 percent, and only reached a certainty when the crowd grew to 1,000.
The tool, which updates frequently as new data is collected, can be viewed at covid19risk. biosci.gatech.edu.
Social distancing ratings
While the risk of contracting COVID is still substantial, it appears that Montgomery County residents are growing weary of staying at home.
Emerging data suggest that residents are not following social distancing recommendations to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Unacast, a company that collects and analyzes smartphone GPS location data, had just launched a Social Distancing Scoreboard showing mobility trends as a way to reinforce the importance of social distancing in relation to slowing the spread of the disease.
The scoreboard assigns a letter grade to all states and counties to show if people are actually changing their habits. In Montgomery, that grade is a D-.
Unacast gathers location data from games, shopping and utility apps that millions of Americans have installed on their smartphones — information the company normally sells to retailers, real estate firms, tourism bureaus and marketing companies.
Using the change in distance traveled prior to the coronavirus outbreak in comparison to present day, areas that have at least a 40 percent decrease in average distance traveled are assigned a grade of A while those that exhibit a less than 10 percent decrease are assigned an F.
Those letter grades are then compared to the number of new cases reported in those areas to help users draw conclusions between social-distancing behavior and the spread of the virus.
The Unacast data shows that Montgomery is failing in two of the three metrics it examines: the reduction of distance traveled (C), the percent change in nonessential visitation (F) and the decrease in human encounters (F).
The low grades in Montgomery are on par with many of its neighboring counties in the southeast region — among the hardest hit by the coronavirus. Berks, Delaware and Schuylkill counties received failing grades while Chester County (D-) received the same grade.
The Montgomery score matches the national grade and is slightly better than the failing statewide grade. Twenty-two states get a F while four states and the District of Columbia rate a C- and that’s the highest grade.