States using wrong metrics on Covid

States Using Wrong Metric for Reopenings

By Steve Levy

Wednesday, 06 May 2020 09:07 AM

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It’s the ultimate Catch 22.

We’re being told by epidemiologists that we should not reopen our economy until new reported cases of coronavirus infections decline.

Simultaneously, we’re rapidly increasing testing nationally, which inevitably will significantly spike the number of positives registered.

Using that benchmark, we won’t be able to open up for months in some places where increased testing leads to more positive recordings.governor of Mississippi put on hold his plans to reopen his state economy because there was an increase in reported positives. 

White House guidelines suggest reopening should be postponed until there is evidence of “Downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period.” According to Vox.com, the number of new tests on Thursday, April 23, came in at more than 191,000, based on the Covid Tracking Project. That was up from the average in the previous week, when there were about 147,000 new tests a day.

Since the start of April, America has averaged about 156,000 new tests a day. Back in mid-March when states were beginning their shutdowns, fewer than 20,000 daily tests were being administered.

As noted in an April 16 article in the Atlantic, the U.S. did almost 25 times as many tests on April 15 as on March 15, and both the daily positive rate and the overall positive rate went up in that month.The authors logically concluded, “The growth in the number of new cases per day, and the growth in the number of new tests per day, are very tightly correlated.

This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.”

As of April 29, 2020, there have been 299,691 positive cases of COVID-19 in the state of New York as reported by The COVID Tracking Project, where there were only six positive cases reported on March 4, 2020.

Though the number of daily reported positive tests have declined in New York over the past week or two, as can be seen in the chart below posted in the Gothamist, the positive rate fluctuates day to day in close correlation of the number of tests performed.

Meanwhile, hospitalizations have continued to decrease. That’s good news given the fact the whole premise of the shutdown was to bend the curve to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system.

While it was once thought we’d have patients dying due to a lack of ventilators, the state now has a huge surplus of the machines and is even lending them to other states. We’ve flattened the curve to such a degree that many health facilities are actually laying off personnel.

That’s why it’s the death rate, and more particularly, the hospitalization rate, that should dictate our plans to reopen, rather than the rate of infections reported.