Exit plansThe Curve Appears to be Flattening — Now What?

In his previous article, “How Will We Know When the COVID-19 Pandemic is Getting Better,” published on 26 March, Kenny Lin outlined 4 signs in the data we should look for: 1) Decrease in rate of growth of daily cases; 2) Decrease in absolute number of daily cases; 3) Decrease in rate of growth of daily deaths and absolute number of daily deaths; and 4) Decrease in hospital admissions and ventilator utilization. In a 13 April article in Medium, Lin writes that the good news is that #1, the number of new daily COVID-19 cases in the United States, seems to have plateaued at approximately 30,000/day across the country. In some states such as Michigan, the number of new daily cases appears to be declining.

He adds:

This is good news – but the bad news is that we still have 30,000 new cases/day. A helpful analogy to consider is the number of daily cases as the speed of a car. We are no longer accelerating, but the gas pedal is still floored as we fly down the highway at 140 miles/hour.

My expectation is that we will see a gradual downslope in daily cases similar to the curve in Italy. Our current data suggests a peak in national daily cases on Apr. 4. We might expect, therefore, to still be registering close to 20,000 new daily cases during the week of Apr. 27. This is not great news.

Now is not the time to let up. That time is coming, but as shown in a government projection obtained by the New York Times, easing of stay-at-home restrictions after 30 days would result in a significant summer spike in cases with an estimated death toll of 200,000. The worst case scenario would be to liberate the nation — to return to normalcy for a period — only to face a second wave of cases and force the country into quarantine a second time. A second round of quarantines would reset the clock and have wasted our collective efforts over the last month to slow the spread of the virus.