COSRE: Community Exposure Risk Estimator for the COVID-19 Pandemic

TL;DR

COSRE is a web-based tool that estimates COVID-19 community exposure risks using a probability model based on real-time data, helping individuals and businesses make informed decisions during the pandemic.

Contribution

This paper introduces a novel birthday-paradox-based probability model and a web system for real-time community exposure risk estimation during COVID-19.

Findings

The model accurately estimates exposure risks in various community settings.

Spatial analysis reveals county-level risk variations across the US.

The system supports dynamic risk assessment for better pandemic response.

Abstract

Due to the complexities of virus genotypes and the stochastic contacts in human society, it is a big challenge to estimate the potential risks of getting exposed to a widely spreading virus. To allow the public to be aware of the exposure risks in their daily activities, we proposed a birthday-paradox-based probability model and implement it into a web-based system named COSRE for estimating community exposure risks of public gathering during a pandemic. The exposure risk means the probability of people meeting potential COVID hosts in public places like grocery stores, gyms, libraries, restaurants, coffee shops, office suits, etc. The model has three inputs: the real-time potential active patients, the population in local communities, and the customer counts in the room. With COSRE, people can explore the possible impacts of the pandemic by doing spatiotemporal analysis, e.g., moving through time and testing a different number of people to see the changes of risks as the pandemic unfolds. The system has the potential to advance our ability to know the accurate exposure risks in various communities and allow us to make plans with improved preparedness and precise responses for the pandemic. We use spatial analysis tools and drew the county-level exposure risks of the United States from April 1 to May 15. The experiment shows that the estimation model is very promising to assist people to be more specifically precise about their safety control in daily routine and social lives and help businesses to dynamically adjust their COVID-19 policies to accelerate their recovery.