A new tool may be helpful to Wisconsin families as they plan their holiday season, while also dealing with the hassles brought by the pandemic.
The "COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool"was developed by a Georgia Institute of Technology professor, and assess the risk of a COVID-19 positive person attending an event, such as Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas morning, in every county in Wisconsin, and in the United States.
The severity of risk is determined by the number of people attending an event, and how bad the COVID-19 pandemic is in a particular county.
There are five levels of risk, each using a percentage. The percent of each level shows the chance of at least one person who has COVID-19 will be present at an event. You can also set how large an event is, ranging from 10 people to 5,000 people.
Looking at it Friday evening, with the event size set to the minimum of 10 people, most counties in Wisconsin, including Milwaukee and its surrounding counties, the risk of such an event is deemed at 25-50 percent. Or 25-50 percent of someone attending your event has the coronavirus.
Raising the event size to about midway through the range, to 50 people at an event, the scenario changes drastically. The tool finds at that point, in almost every county in Wisconsin, it is 75-99 percent likely a COVID-19 positive person is attending your event. Only three counties in the state have slightly less.
The creators of the tool say the data used in the interactive map comes from the COVID-19 tracking projectand the New York Times's COVID-19 data project, according to the Hill.