May 1, 2020
Governor Cuomo
Hospitalization rate is down. Good news. Net change down. That’s good news. Intubations down. That’s good news. COVID Hospitalizations, new ones per day, just about flat. That’s not great news. Actually up at tick, so that is not good news.
What we’re watching now is how fast the decline, how low does it go? We don’t want to see 1000 new cases every day. We’d like to see that in the low hundreds, ideally, of new cases every day. Death rate, terrible news, 330. You see the decline has been slow at best and still disgustingly high. So we’re making progress, that’s for sure, but we’re not out of the woods yet and we’re proceeding with caution, and there are caution signs out there that we should pay attention to. Singapore is talking about a second wave with 900 new cases. This is after they controlled the beast. They were on the decline. They’re now looking at new cases.
Germany is a situation that we should also watch and learn from. They relaxed and started to reopen. They’re now seeing an increase. These are interesting. The rate of infection, which is what we watch. Was it 0.7? One person infecting 0.7 of a percent, obviously less than one person, 1% infection rate is one person effecting one person. They were at 0.7 they started to reopen, in 10 days they went up to a one on the infection rate. That’s troubling. Shows you how fast the infection rate can increase if you don’t do it right on the reopening. So proceed with caution.
Our reopening is different. We don’t have a conceptual plan. We don’t have an abstract plan because there is no conceptual plan. There is no abstract plan. You have to have a plan that is based on facts, based on specifics. This is not about politics. This is not about spin. This is not about emotion. There are no conspiracy theories at work here. We outlined a 12 step plan that is factual, that is based on numbers based on data, and then it has a numerical circuit breaker that is not subject to personal emotion or desire, but just checks and monitors that infection rate that we just saw in Germany and is watching for those increases, and if there’s an increase, circuit breaker stops the reopening at that point.
Some of the specifics we’re looking at, you must have 30% of your hospital beds available. We can’t go back to where we were, where we overwhelmed the system. We have to have a 30% buffer, we have to have 30% of ICU beds. We have to have that buffer before we start bumping up against total capacity, and we have to watch the hospitalization rate, and the diagnostic testing rate, how many are positive? How many in negative? Which we’ll take on a continuous basis. You see that number start going up, worry. But it’s all based on the data and the numbers. I’m sorry. And the rate of transmission, Rt, rate of transmission, I wrote in track. Rate of transmission has to be 1.1 or less. We just said Germany is at 0.1. Because at 1.1 that is textbook outbreak, so watch the numbers and watch the transmission rate.