Coronavirus Spread In Washington, DC: See Your Risk Of Exposure
WASHINGTON, DC — Washington, DC is in the midst of an increase in coronavirus cases and DC health officials are urging residents to avoid long-distance travel and take precautions when celebrating with others.
DC is in phase two of reopening, which prohibits gatherings of more than 50 people and discourages travel outside the National Capital Region. The governors of neighboring Virginia and Maryland have introduced new restrictions in recent days in response to the health trends.
What is your risk of exposure?
Researchers from several universities have created an event risk planning tool for every county in the nation. The map shows the risk of coronavirus transmission based on an event's size and location.
A new tool shows the estimated chance — between 0 and 100 percent — that you'll encounter at least one person with the coronavirus at an event in your county. You can reduce the risk by wearing a mask, distancing and gathering outdoors in smaller groups, researchers said.
The tool looks at the risk by gathering sizes between 10 and 5,000. As of Wednesday, if you were to attend an event with 10 people in the District of Columbia, there would be a 9 percent chance that someone at the event would have the virus, according to the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool. For a gathering size of 25 people, that chance increases to 20 percent. A gathering of 50 people bears a 36 percent chance that someone has the virus.
This is using a 5:1 ascertainment bias, meaning the researchers assume there are five times more cases than are being reported.
"By default we assume there are five times more cases than are being reported," the research team said in a statement. "In places with less testing availability, that bias may be higher."
Two Georgia Institute of Technology professors led the creation of the project, and their team included researchers from Stanford University and the Applied Bioinformatics Laboratory.
Use the COVID-19 "Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool" here. See DC's latest COVID-19 update here.
Patch editor Amber Fisher contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on the Washington DC Patch
