This Chart Explains Why Reopening the Economy Is Still So Risky
A graphic representation, below, created by Joshua Weitz, a professor at Georgia Tech studying theoretical ecology and quantitative biology, demonstrates this well. One flaw with this graph is that it assumes that the cases are equally distributed nationally. We can quickly see that for the number of known cases in the United States (y-axis), even in modestly sized crowds, the chance that one or more people is SARS-CoV-2 positive is high. The horizontal lines represent a few scenarios of where we are right now—we know there are 400,000 cases circulating in the United States, but it’s likely there are five or 10 times that number (those are the scenarios at 2 million and 4 million cases). You can scan across those lines to see the risk of presence of the virus at gatherings of various sizes.