The federal government issued new guidelines to help state and local government officials with decision criteria to consider to relax some of the interventions currently in place without jeopardizing public health from exceeding hospital treatment capacity.
It’s a three-phase set of guidelines for governors and others to consider with the goal of mitigating the risk of resurgence and protect the most vulnerable. The guidelines specify symptoms, cases, and hospital capacity criteria that must be satisfied before proceeding to a phased comeback.
Take a look at the guidelines for yourself. My take was that it is reasonably well thought out but there wasn’t any gating criteria emphasis (page 1) regarding diagnostic and antibody testing availability.
That seems like a pretty big oversight to me- as testing availability is important for contact tracing (once community spread wanes). Widespread accurate antibody testing is also important information for businesses to have access to as they plan their individual re-openings.
The guidelines don’t even mention predictive modeling as a gating criteria component. Predictive modeling can provide important information for decision makers- arguably more important than the information provided by looking at simple trends in case counts (gating criteria number 2).
There’s also a big emphasis on syndromic survieillance in the gating criteria that (in my opinion) is given too high of a priority. I would have replaced the syndromic surveillance gating criteria with predictive modeling outcomes.
