What’s your risk of getting COVID? It’s getting harder to tell.
Figuring out your risk of getting COVID-19 is hard right now.
On the CDC’s community risk map, North Carolina is shaded in green, orange and yellow but toggle to another one of the CDC’s maps, and every county in country becomes a crimson red.
The reported number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is undermined by at-home tests, many of which are not factored into the state’s case numbers. With widely accessible vaccines and less severe variants, even the number of hospitalizations doesn’t offer a clear view of the state of the pandemic.
Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease doctor from Duke Health, said interpreting risk level from these various data points is difficult even for experts.
“The trend here is more illness, more people in hospital and more people with COVID,” he said. “But truly understanding your individual risk is hard.”
Hospitalizations are up
In the summer of 2020, before there were vaccines and effective treatments for COVID, the number of hospitalizations was an easy way of measuring the virus’ impact.
Now, that statistic means something very different from what it meant even as recently as the winter, when the majority of patients were being hospitalized with severe COVID pneumonia.
Wolfe said the current wave of BA.5 has brought on a slight rise in hospitalizations — but mostly from patients with conditions exacerbated by the virus.
Wolf posed an example patient: an older adult with heart failure and diabetes who contracts COVID.
“Even if its mild, it’s enough to tip all of those things out of balance,” he said. “You may need the hospital fundamentally because of COVID. But it’s not the kind of COVID pneumonia that we were seeing a couple of years ago.”
Dr. Susan Kansagra, assistant secretary for public health at the NC Department of Health, said that number also includes patients who were hospitalized for another ailment and happened to test positive for COVID-19.
How the experts do it
Wolfe suggested using a couple of different metrics that he uses to cobble together a risk assessment for himself and his family.
First, he said, look at the CDC’s community level map, the number of people with COVID in the ICU, the number of hospitalized COVID patients and the death rate.
“They’re all sort of surrogate measures of the magnitude of illness,” he said.
Then consider personal factors like whether your family members are vaccinated and boosted or if they have a chronic illness that suppresses their immune system.
Finally, think about behavior. Public-facing jobs and summer camps, he said, are both examples of behaviors that can put you at higher risk.
“Your individual risk is modified by how hot the county is,” he said. “But there’s many other things that play into that.”
Teddy Rosenbluth covers science for The News & Observer in a position funded by Duke Health and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work
This story was originally published July 21, 2022 at 5:45 AM.
