So You’re Going Outside: A Physics-Based Coronavirus Infection Risk Estimator for Leaving the House
Heads up, this material is now outdated! For the latest in coronavirus probabilistic risk estimation, please see https://www.microcovid.org/.
So we’re quarantined. We’re social distancing, avoiding groups, and staying 6 feet apart as much as possible. But this still leaves so many questions!
- What if the sidewalk is only 4 feet wide — should I #stayHomeSaveLives?
- How does “riskiness of the hangout” scale with “length of the hangout”?
- How risky is going to Costco vs. going to the corner store?
- How does this all change if we’re wearing masks?
I’m a mathematician, and I’m quarantined in a community house with nine other people. I also worked part-time for three years as a network epidemiology research assistant at MIT. Burning questions like this came up at all my house meetings, so to sync our collective understandings, I made a physics-based activity risk model and fed our questions into it.
In the rest of this article, I’ll step through the answers, and I’ll show you how to use the model to answer questions of your own!
Disclaimer: all models are wrong, but some are useful. I think this one is useful…
