Question: I’ve been hearing a lot about how the United States has turned a corner, or how we can now “see the light at the end of the tunnel”. Of course, a lot of this talk is related to reopening. How realistic is that perspective?

Answer: I was wondering about that too. We know that New York State has turned the corner with the proportion of positive test results decreasing, the number of hospitalizations decreasing, and daily deaths decreasing (see Figure 1). These promising trends are indeed something to celebrate! It’s even more meaningful since NYS represents the biggest outbreak in our country and one of the biggest in the world. But we shouldn’t confuse New York’s success for the success of the country as a whole.

I went ahead and removed NYS data from the USA data on testing, cases, and deaths (datasource: The COVID Tracking Project). What we see in Figure 2 is that in the USA (excluding NYS), daily/weekly deaths continue to increase; the proportion of tests that are positive continues to rise; the number of tests per day has been flat for several weeks; and the crude mortality rate continues to clip up. As a whole, the United States is no where near achieving the “gate metrics” required to consider reopening (listed in Q&A of 4/19). That’s the pessimistic read. The optimistic read is that widespread social distancing measures across the country have indeed curbed the growth of the epidemic. For example, even though daily/weekly deaths are increasing, the rate of increase is much slower. Similarly, the proportion of tests that are positive is increasing at a much slower rate. Hospitalization data from CDC’s COVID-Net are even more promising with overall rates of hospitalizations decreasing (Figure 3). So all in all, I think we should be proud of what we’ve accomplished together during this disaster. And, we have a long way to go to come out the other side.

Figure 1. New York State’s Promising Trends

Figure 2. US Not-Quite-Promising Trends (excluding NYS data)

Figure 3. Weekly Rates of Hospitalizations across COVID-NET are Decreasing