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| Silhouette of a crowd in the stands at a soccer game Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images |
My cousin had to cancel his bar mitzvah, which was planned for Saturday in Washington, DC. Some 100 people were scheduled to be there, but like many houses of worship this week, the synagogue suspended its services to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. For my cousin, it means postponing the payoff from years of study and a celebration with friends and family.
Many other Americans are in similar situations during the outbreak of Covid-19, which has sickened more than 4,100 Americans and killed more than 40, according to an online tally being kept by Johns Hopkins University. Schools, religious institutions, and sports and concert venues have closed. Those who can work from home have been urged to do so. The White House reportedly overruled a proposal from the Centers for Disease Control that would have urged anyone over 60 to avoid airplane travel...
From a mathematical perspective, determining how big a crowd is safe depends on a couple of key questions: How many people in a given area are infected with the disease? And how big is the event? If you know those things, you can estimate the probability of someone getting infected at the event. An elegant “Covid-19 Event Risk Assessment Planner” by Georgia Tech quantitative biologist Joshua Weitz makes the following calculation: If, say, 20,000 cases of infection are actively circulating in the US (far more than are known so far), and you host a dinner party for 10 folks, there’s a 0.061 percent chance that an attendee will be infected. But if you attend a 10,000-person hockey match, there’s a 45 percent chance. Hence the suspension of the NHL season, along with the NBA, March Madness, and Major League Baseball.
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Source: WIRED
