See why keeping groups small can save lives in the era of COVID-19
The risk of exposing people in a group to the coronavirus goes up exponentially with event size, modeling work suggests.
Why are large events so dangerous in a pandemic? Just look at the math: As COVID-19 cases increase across the U.S., the risk of exposing members of a group to the virus goes up exponentially with event size, according to Georgia Institute of Technology biologist Joshua Weitz.
The charts above illustrate a risk calculation that Weitz made to show the phenomenon. The risks seen here reflect the probability of someone with an illness such as COVID-19 attending an event, if the event were filled with randomly selected U.S. residents.
Even in this idealized form, the math is stark: The risk of a sick person attending an event grows rapidly with both the number of attendees and the number of total U.S.
