Coronavirus In Milwaukee County: What Is Your Risk Of Exposure?

MILWAUKEE COUNTY, WI — 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.

With the holidays fast approaching and COVID-19 rates climbing, public health officials are urging people to avoid gatherings of any size.

The 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.

As of Tuesday, if you were to attend an event with 25 people in Milwaukee County, there would be a 70% percent chance that someone at the event would have the virus, according to the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool. If you hang out with ten people, the chance drops to 40%.

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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."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."

>> Access the COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool here.

State officials worked with Google and Apple to set up the system, which uses Bluetooth technology to share anonymous tokens with other phones. If someone tests positive for the coronavirus and chooses to upload their results, people who are at risk of infection will receive an alert of potential exposure.

Tokens are not associated with any phone number, name, location or IP address, and they change every 15 minutes to add an extra layer of anonymity, officials said.

Amber Fisher, Patch Staff contributed to this report.