Can microCOVID assess the risk of smoking weed with friends?
Now, with record-breaking case numbers of delta variants in the national consciousness, responsible behavior is again a moving goal.
So we came across a risk calculator called microCOVID that claims to estimate a person’s likelihood of getting COVID through various interactions, and it made us think about the anatomy of a cannabis session. Can such a tool help figure out the risks of smoking weed with friends?
What is a microCOVID?
A microCOVID is a unit of measure that gives a one in a million chance of developing COVID. It is also the name of the risk calculator itself.
The calculator breaks down social interactions into individual elements and estimates a person’s likelihood of getting COVID through a certain interaction. Users enter a US region and activity type, and add optional modifiers such as masks, distance, vaccination status, and current behavior. The microCOVID calculator in turn generates a numerical estimate of the risk of infection in microCOVID units or μCOV.
The term “microCOVID” was coined by the creators of the computer: a team of nine from San Francisco, consisting of engineers, doctors, scientists and technicians who happen to be roommates.
When nine people share the proverbial kitchen and two and a half bathrooms during a global pandemic, terms such as “high risk” and “low risk” are lacking in precision. As a roommate, you needed a neutral measuring stick – a tool to determine, in the team’s words, “the numerical likelihood of getting COVID through different types of interactions.”
To create this remarkable solution to social responsibility, House MicroCOVID turned to peer-reviewed science: aerosol distribution models, mask studies, COVID-specific public health analyzes, and other relevant materials.
The nine creators decided that they were satisfied with a collective 1% chance of developing COVID per calendar year, which equates to 2,400 micro-COVIDs per year per person, or about 46 micro-COVIDs per week per person.
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This is how the microCOVID calculator works
The calculator allows users to take a detailed or general look at the people they interact with – by viewing a companion either as the average person for a given geographic location or as a collection of different experiences a person had in the past two weeks Has.
But even “average” is a tricky term here. Take, for example, the value attributed to the “average American” at the time of this writing: 10,000 microCOVIDs – or a 1% chance of transmitting the virus. In Seattle, Washington, where Leafly is headquartered, the average person is weighted at 7,000 microCOVIDs. In Okeechobee, Florida, there are 30,000 microCOVIDs.
In addition to geographic population data, lifestyle and recent social activity also provide information about a particular person’s risk.
For example, in Seattle, the average person who only leaves home to go to the grocery store is weighted at 200 microCOVIDs. If the same person has walked into a bar in the past two weeks, their payload increases to 200,000 microCOVIDs. It should be noted that these numbers decrease significantly with vaccination.
How to use microCOVID to estimate the risk of smoking with friends
The calculator lacks the “smoke weed with friends” button, but it does provide a list of common social scenarios and lifestyle conditions, such as getting together with friends, going to work, and living with roommates or partners.
For our purposes, after entering your location, the default hang out with friends is a good place to start – “Indoor unmasked hangout with 2 other people”. This preset assumes that you and two other people are together without masks, 3 feet apart, and speak at conversation volume for an hour.
The calculator’s parameters can be adjusted, including seat pitch, hangout duration, number of people, volume of calls and location (indoor / outdoor).
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When modeling risks for smoking with friends, we need a way to address coughing and saliva swapping while sharing pipes, vapes, or joints.
The first is simple: the calculator can take cough into account – under the “Loud” option on the Conversation Volume tab.
Unfortunately, it is not so easy to get the computer to integrate parts of the sharing at the same time. There’s a “kissing” option under the distance module, but while kissing is the best substitute for sharing a smoking device, the calculator disables some other features when selected. Both modifiers increase the risk of developing COVID by five times.
It should be noted that in the Q&A section of microCOVID’s whitepaper, the team addresses the uncertainty involved in accounting for situations like ours, which involve several changes to a standard scenario: “We think it makes sense to keep stacking [modifications] somehow on. How exactly they combine is not exactly clear. “
Example scenarios for smoking
Although calculating the risk is not an exact science and probability models are constantly changing, with the pre-baked options of microCOVID we have determined some numbers for common smoke-vision processes.
Remember: location and lifestyle influence the calculator’s estimates. In addition, the way in which several factors in virus transmission work together is not fully understood for situations like ours.
Indoor sesh with friends
Session: Share a joint with two friends indoors in Seattle, WA
Duration: 1 hour
Location: inside
Distance: 3 feet apart
Masks: No masks
Vaccination: All vaccinated (Pfizer / Moderna)
Speech volume: normal
Using the standard scenario “Indoor unmasked hangout with 2 other people” of the computer, we can create our hypothetical smoke sesh.
Even before a joint is lit, the calculator determines the probability of developing COVID, between 38 and 350 microCOVIDs or an average of 120 microCOVIDs: that’s a 0.00012% – 120-in-a-million chance of getting COVID.
When people cough, choose Loud from the Conversation Volume menu, or when sharing a joint, use the Kiss option from the Distance drop-down menu. Each applies a 5-fold modification, and using just one increases the risk to ~ 490 microCOVIDs or between 160-1,500 microCOVIDs significantly. Note that “kissing” has minimal interaction costs.
The use of coughing and kissing multiplies the estimates by at least 10 times and up to 25 times depending on how you combine risk factors, resulting in an estimate between 980-2,500 microCOVIDs – an approximate 0.25% chance of Going off your sesh with a case of COVID is the high end.
Remember, the makers of the calculator said they are comfortable with around 46 microCOVIDs per week per person exposed. That means that one indoor sesh could potentially consume about 3/4 of your budget for a whole year. This activity is marked as “dangerously high risk” by the computer.
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Outdoor sesh with friends
Session: Have a joint with two friends out in Seattle, WA. share
Duration: 1 hour
Location: Outside
Distance: 3 feet apart
Masks: No masks
Vaccinations: All vaccinated (Pfizer / Moderna)
Speech volume: normal
Moving our sesh outside can provide huge savings if we have time to do a risk assessment. The calculator divides the projected risk estimate of an outdoor interaction by 20.
Before it lights up, the computer estimates a microCOVID risk of 1.9-17. On average, this is a 0.00000058% or 5.8 in a million chance of developing COVID.
As before, coughing increases the risk by 5 times, i.e. about 30 microCOVIDs. When sharing parts or adding “kisses”, the risk immediately returns to the level of indoor spaces, or up to 160-1500 microCOVIDs – a “very high risk”, according to the calculator.
To calculate the total cost of interaction, you can add up the values for kissing and coughing, although it is unclear how these factors would combine in the real world.
Other locations
It should be noted that, despite our modified Sesh in Seattle, things are a little worse in Okeechobee County, Florida. For both cough and sharing modifiers, it’s between 500 and 4,000 microCOVIDs: that’s more than a month – and up to about half – of an annual risk budget of 1%, just for one smoking unit.
Choose wisely, friends.
Matt Stangel
Matt Stangel is Leafly’s Oregon Product Specialist. His cannabis-related writings have appeared in The Guardian, Willamette Week, Cascadia Magazine, and elsewhere – links to which are available on Cannapinions.com.
View article by Matt Stangel
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