Epidemic modeling software company Epistemix, which has been helping government agencies, schools, and hospitals to assess risk factors throughout the pandemic, recently released new data that charts the seasonality of Covid-19 and highlights the times of year during which risk of infection is highest in various major US cities.
Epistemix has been working directly with the events industry for the past year to help in-person events return safely, and this new data provides valuable insight that eventprofs can look to when planning ahead in this time of continued uncertainty. As Epistemix notes in their blog post, “By the time you’re tracking the latest surge, it’s already too late to change anything that required advance planning, and rigorous forecasts are only reliable up to a few months into the future.”
Obviously, this data is based on past trends and cannot predict the future, but it provides much-needed, science-based information that planners can use to make a more informed decision about when to schedule their events, and it suggests that perhaps certain events should be rescheduled for the foreseeable future, depending on where they’re located.
Over the past two years, most of us have noticed general trends in when Covid spikes in certain areas of the country, but we haven’t actually had clear, easy-to-digest data to go off of. Epistemix’s helpful chart, shown below, changes that.
In this chart, red represents more risk when compared to the rest of the country, while blue represents less risk. The cities are grouped into three regions that have experienced similar seasonal Covid patterns: Northeast, Southeast, and West-Central.
The worst times and places to plan any type of event, according to the data, would be March in New York, and July in Miami. By contrast, the best time would be July in Boston. It remains to be seen how well these patterns hold up in 2022 — right now, March is shaping up to be relatively low-risk in New York, for example — but they offer a good starting point for any event organizer looking to the future, which is more than we’ve had since the beginning of the pandemic.