What are your odds of getting COVID-19?
Bottom Line: While we’re waiting out the virus attempting to live our lives to the fullest public officials will allow for us in South Florida, it’s a good time for a heavy dose of pragmatism - which seems to be in short supply. Maybe it’s just me but the CDC attempting to cancel Halloween activities, ironically the one day of the year people literally put on masks to go out into the world, hit me as the pandemic version of jumping the shark. Especially over five weeks in advance. With that in mind, how would you like to know what your odds are of contracting COVID-19 this week? How would you like to be able to calculate the risk of activities you’re considering? There’s a way to do it. It’s the microCOVID Project. What does this project allow you to do? According to the researchers who created a calculator (in the link above):
- This is a project to quantitatively estimate the COVID risk to you from your ordinary daily activities. We trawled the scientific literature for data about the likelihood of getting COVID from different situations, and combined the data into a model that people can use. We estimate COVID risk in units of microCOVIDs, where 1 microCOVID = a one-in-a-million chance of getting COVID.
That sounds awfully fancy but here’s the deal. They created a calculator which lets you put in your state, your county, your level of interaction with others and your activities to calculate your specific weekly risk of contracting COVID-19. To give you an idea of how it works and what your risk might potentially look like... Here’s my calculated risk. Based on living in Palm Beach County, interacting with an average of five people daily, being married and not having increased risk factors – my risk of contracting the virus is 0.7% this week. Or here’s another way of looking at it. Going to work, generally living my life this week results in a 99.3% chance of not contracting COVID-19. One wonders when it is that public policy will equal reality. Are we not supposed to live our lives, or trick or treat, as the case may be – until there’s a 99.9% chance of not getting the virus? Or is even that not good enough? Pragmatism and this calculator. Check them out and pass them along.