My area's risk level is "Very Low."
The nearest "Very High" risk area is about two miles away ... and yet it has the exact same characteristics in the NYT data as my area.\
Makes me wonder how they even assign the risk levels. You can probably do a better job with much less effort by simply looking at population density and no other data.
I suspect they are privy to where the cases actually live rather than the CDC merely naming the entire county and leaving people wondering if it is near them or not. The extremely high sort of verifies where the locals here are guessing the locations of cases.