With no clear direction from the federal government on how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been hard to decide what’s safe and unsafe as states begin to open up. There's no right answer; you just need to know the risks and how much risk you're willing to take. That's why Professor Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Dr. James P. Phillips, MD, the Chief of Disaster Medicine at GWU Emergency Medicine, and I developed a COVID-19 Risk Index to help you do this, based on four key factors:
1) Enclosed space
2) Duration of interaction
3) Crowds
4) Forceful exhalation
Again, we hope this Risk Index is helpful to you as you decide what you are comfortable doing as these activities become available. We created this as a public service, so please feel free to tweet, post, e-mail, and print and hang this on your refrigerator or around your workplace. You can download the infographic here, or here for the Spanish language version
Other available translations:
The Atlantic. January 2020. Read the article.
Read the article. The New York Times. September 2019
Read this article. The New York Times, August 2019.
Click here to read the article.
Posted Aug 12, 2016 on The Hill.