We have good evidence that the Stay at Home Order had been effective at slowing the spread of the SARS CoV2 virus. In each county you’ll see that there had been a slow decline in the ratio of new cases over total cases up until May 26. In pretty much every county that ratio rebounds starting on May 26 and continues today.
The sizable increase in cases, percent positives, ratio of new to total cases, and COVID hospital census in the last 10 days coincides with a week’s incubation period with some time for lab testing since the end of the Stay at Home Order.
There’s still a little room to spare within most hospitals, but the safety margin continues to decrease. Some hospitals are very close to their ICU bed capacity right now. It’ll continue to be very important to keep an eye on the capacity. When the warning bells go off there won’t be much time to make policy adjustments to increase capacity.
In my opinion there are 5 key interventions that, if implemented immediately, could stem the tide of new cases and hospitalizations:
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More focus on testing and infection control in assisted living and skilled nursing;
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Enhance contact tracing;
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Allow cities to implement mitigation strategies;
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Require wearing cloth masks in public; and
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Stronger compliance incentives.
Failing to do the above effectively could result in either a need to implement the hospital surge capacity plan, another Stay at Home Order, or both.
Note: Saturday night the ADHS changed the way that they calculate available hospital capacity on Hospital Bed and Availability dashboard. Their former approach added theoretical surge beds to both the numerator and denominator (available beds and occupied beds). That approach provided an inaccurate view of what’s really available. The new approach is a better way to portray the data.
You can see a host of data including several interesting charts on the ASU Biodesign site. There’s more background info in this Horizon clip too.
