  The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the virus severe
acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has impacted over 200
countries leading to hospitalizations and deaths of millions of people. Public
health interventions, such as risk estimators, can reduce the spread of
pandemics and epidemics through influencing behavior, which impacts risk of
exposure and infection. Current publicly available COVID-19 risk estimation
tools have had variable effectiveness during the pandemic due to their
dependency on rapidly evolving factors such as community transmission levels
and variants. There has also been confusion surrounding certain personal
protective strategies such as risk reduction by mask-wearing and vaccination.
In order to create a simple easy-to-use tool for estimating different
individual risks associated with carrying out daily-life activity, we developed
COVID-19 Activity Risk Calculator (CovARC). CovARC is a gamified public health
intervention as users can "play with" how different risks associated with
COVID-19 can change depending on several different factors when carrying out
routine daily activities. Empowering the public to make informed, data-driven
decisions about safely engaging in activities may help to reduce COVID-19
levels in the community. In this study, we demonstrate a streamlined, scalable
and accurate COVID-19 risk calculation system. Our study also demonstrates the
quantitative impact of vaccination and mask-wearing during periods of high case
counts. Validation of this impact could inform and support policy decisions
regarding case thresholds for mask mandates, and other public health
interventions.
