Bad news, St. Louis.
Kinsa, the public health tracking company, has a new website where you can enter your zip code and find out the current score for your county’s flu and COVID-19 risk level. The company has a reputation for accurately predicting COVID-19 outbreaks an average of ten days before they happen.
On the local illness risk-calculating site, it seems that if you enter any local zip code that you’ll see a scary high score and get some version of the same result: “Critical Risk: Use extreme caution.”
We all know that the St. Louis area is experiencing an unprecedented surge of COVID-19 cases that are filling up our hospitals and exhausting our medical professionals, but sometimes it’s hard to get a grip on just how bad our situation is currently.
To understand just how badly we’re doing here, specifically, all you have to do is look at where we rank against the rest of the nation.
Journalist Christopher Elliot asked Kinsa to pull data on the most high-risk counties in the United States and based on their most recent data, Kinsa ranked St. Louis county tenth on a list of most dangerous counties in America for Thanksgiving.
St. Louis county’s risk score was assessed at 97 out of 100, following larger numbers from Lake County (IL), Will County (IL), Kent County (MI), El Paso County (TX), Salt Lake County (UT), Milwaukee County (WI), Denver County (CO), Cook County (IL) and Hennepin County (MN).
Kinsa builds these risk scores using numbers from “case data from the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.”
To find Kinsa’s assessment of your local illness risk or for the place you might be planning to visit for Thanksgiving, visit HealthWeather.us.
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