How We Reopen in One Chart (aka “Can I Go to Summer Camp, Dad?”)
And here is an animated version of this visualization:
A Visualization to Answer my Girls’ Questions
Like many kids, my girls have been focused on what they are missing and whether the things that they love will happen this summer. My older daughter is going to be really sad if she misses what would be her last year as a camper at Farm Camp. My younger daughter really wants to see my parents, who live in Portland, OR.
As I was thinking about these opening up questions, Governor Newsom cracked the door open on the quarantine, by allowing elective surgery. It is becoming increasingly clear that the opening back up is going to proceed much more slowly than the closing down. As a way of helping myself think about how the opening up might proceed, I came up with the visualization scheme above. Let me introduce it with some basics:
Rank the Activity on its Risk and Importance
Take every activity important to you and rate that activity in two different ways: risk and importance:
Risk: Place the activity along the vertical axis according to how risky the activity is. Riskier activities appear near the top less risky activities appear near the bottom.
Importance: The horizontal axis rates the activity as to how essential it is. Activities essential to keeping a society running appear on the left side of the visualization. Activities essential to keeping individuals healthy also appear to the left. The more an activity is purely for pleasure, the more it moves to the right.
Activities in the top right corner are those very risky activities that are only for fun, such as large public gatherings for live sports or concerts. Activities in the lower left are activities that we need to keep our society functional i.e., we need farmers to provide food, and we need people to move that food to us. I have placed other activities on this visualization roughly where I think they belong, but we’ll discuss the uncertainty around activity placement in a moment.
More on Risk
When you rank the activity on its risk, consider how likely the activity is to spread SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) in the community:
The more individuals you come into contact, with the riskier the activity.
The more time you spend with other individuals, the riskier the activity.
The more surfaces you are exposed to, the riskier the activity.
Also consider the how risky the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is to the individuals involved:
Visits in a retirement community are risky because the population is very susceptible to COVID-19.
Opening up schools is risky because lots of kids and teachers come into contact with each other every day, and can spread SARS-CoV-2 in the community - though the kids themselves will almost all have mild cases of COVID-19.
The characteristics of the virus determine the riskiness of various activities. This axis is an objective number that, given enough information, could be nailed down. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is a lot we do not know about the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and so the risk numbers are not certain. Epidemiologists are the best people to determine the riskiness of various activities and to choose where to place activities on the vertical axis.
It is important to note that the riskiness of the activities can be affected by our own behavior: e.g., wearing a mask lowers the risk, enforcement of public health measures lowers the risk.
A Little More on Importance
By contrast, the horizontal axis is subjective. The individual and the community need to come together to decide how critical an activity is. For example is in person voting an essential activity, or is voting by mail sufficient?
Movement of the Quarantine Boundary
The quarantine time marker (the diagonal line) is placed such that all activities below and to the left of it are activities that are allowed at that time. As the quarantine is slowly lifted, this quarantine time marker moves up and to the right, and more and more activities become permitted. I have animated the movement of this line in the video above.
I’ll most likely revisit this visualization in the future, but for now, I hope that it helps you, as it has helped me, understand what the next few months will look and feel like. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it looks like I need to break some bad news to my daughters, unfortunately.
I hope this visualization tool helps you set your own expectations for what reopening might look like.
If you find it useful, please send it around to help others set their own expectations as to what reopening might look like.