ORLANDO, Fla. - Before you start inviting friends and relatives over for Thanksgiving, you may want to give the 'COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool' a try.
"You’ll know what the probability of one of your guests having COVID. Even if they’re coming out of town, or you’re traveling out of town, this map can help with things," Assistant Professor Clio Andris explained.
A group of 10 professors and students at Georgia Tech developed the interactive map.
Professor Andris said that the map "pulls data from the New York Times on the number of cases that are in a county and we also have the population in a county."
The number of known cases is then multiplied by asymptomatic cases and from that computes the probability.
Left photo by Getty Images. Right photo by Prof. Joshua Weitz and Prof. Clio Andris at the Georgia Institute of Technology, along with researchers at the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory and Stanford University, and powered by RStudio.
Dr. Stephen Beckett showed FOX 35 how it works, stating that "you see the U.S. and all these different polygons which are different counties. And if you scroll across the counties you see a different risk guard, name of the county and the time it was last updated."
We asked him specifically about Central Florida, to which he said "Orange County, for a group size of 50, we see a risk level of 46 percent right now. We can also change the event size right here. You can go as low as 10 people and high as 5,000."
So if you’re having a group of ten to your home, there's a "12 percent chance risk that one or more of those 10 people may have COVID. So at least one person in that group of 10 might have COVID."
You can also check COVID percentages overseas.
If you're interested in using this COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Tool, go to https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/.
Tune in to FOX 35 Orlando for the latest Central Florida news.