KNOX COUNTY, Tenn. — If you're considering traveling for the holidays, a new interactive map helps you weigh the risk of attending an event or gathering in any county across the nation.
Researchers at Georgia Tech created the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool to give a visual look at how your trip could create a ripple effect.
Whether you're going on a road trip, catching a flight or sitting down for a virtual get-together with family — people everywhere have difficult choices to make for a 2020 Thanksgiving.
"Right now, a lot of us are trying to make some decisions about what we will be doing this holiday season," Mallory Harris said, a Ph.D. student at Stanford who helped develop the new heat map with Georgia Tech.
The map shows the risk of COVID-19 if you plan on traveling for a holiday event.
"Our hope is that we can turn these raw case counts that are really kind of non-intuitive to look at and turn it into something that is more familiar to people," Harris said.
It's a visual way to look at the daily case count data in counties all across the nation, showing the risk of coming into contact with someone who has the virus at each of the locations.
"Everywhere in the U.S. right now, there is some risk that you will be exposed to this virus," Harris said.
Here's how it works: if you decide to go to a Thanksgiving dinner with 10 people in Knox County, for example, your risk level hovers right around 20 percent. But, if you increase the number of people at the event, the risk goes up.
Across the board, the more people at the event, the higher the chance that someone there will bring COVID-19 with them.
In the U.S., users can see more of the higher risk areas are in the Midwest.
"It's also important for people to understand that we're not saying the likelihood that you actually get sick at an event because there are a lot more factors that come into that," Harris explained.
It's important to remember low-risk doesn't mean people won't face any risk over the holiday season. Washing your hands, wearing a mask and practicing social distancing helps stop the spread of the virus.
This is just one resource you can use to empower your decisions during the pandemic. The data is updated daily.