If county is dark red, step up social distancing
Viral risk categories: (see About>About>Terminology for definition of how the category is assigned)
    High Risk
  1. Death %
  2. Accel
  3. Hi Spread
  4. Hot
    5. Medium Risk
  5. Spread
  6. Decel
    7. Low Risk
  7. Watch
  8. Down
  9. Low cases
    10. Very Low Risk
    Low risk for more than 3 weeks
    Viral x Hot: is a custom created 2 dimensional risk measure. Note, it has nothing to so with state or county designations of risk level or color coding.
    It is calculated as folows:
  1. current viral expansion risk, i.e. what stage the virus spread is in, expanding or contracting. See Category's number. This number is inverted to be a "risk" amount, where category 1's risk is set to 100 down through category number 9, which would be set to 10.
  2. how "hot" the county is. Number of unknown spreaders per 100 population (estm measure not count). Hot is the odds of people coming in contact with others who may not know they are infected, but who can infect you! Note, this is an estimate based on viral characteristics that have been studied and measured. Lots of variability but this measure/calculation can give us at least a ballpark number for this important piece of information we all need for making informed, smart daily risk decisions and tradeoffs. Plus it is very good at reflecting direction and relative magnitude of change as case and hospitalization counts change over time. If starts getting worse, then temporary action is called for by all in area to bring the risk back down.

If hot is 1 per 100 then this measure will be the straight the viral expansion risk from 10 to 100. However, if there are very few active spreaders in the county then likely there is good social distancing practices and viral expansion does not have much fuel. If there is an external infector and spread starts to accelerate from that, the risk is lower in that there may be time to nip an outbreak in the bud with immediate attention to stepping up social distancing and pro-active testing.

If on the other hand, active/100 is high, then there is lots of fuel for virus expansion, or, for the viral expansion to catch fire again. This makes things more at risk. Note, if there are more than 1 in 10 spreaders in your county then the StepUp will come out to be 100 regardless!

After following this for a few months, I'm thinking if this number is over, say 30, please consider moderately increasing your social distancing and if the VxH gets over 50, step it up for a while. Always use your own judgment based on your knowledge and local guidelines.

Remember: Collective effort multiplies individual efforts in slowing the spread.

Informed layman's viewpoint. See "About>About" for descriptions and information. Estimates and data smoothing are used to present coherent numbers from period to period. Informational only. Should not be relied upon as your sole source for decision making.