The website covidexitstrategy.org attempts to answer “How We Reopen Safely.”
Using the gating criteria provided by the White House, we’ve tracked each state’s progress towards its reduction in symptoms and cases, health system readiness, and increased test capacity.
Using sources like the COVID Tracking Project and the CDC we are able to start measure how a state is controlling the epidemic. Some sources are more “real-time” like case data, but others can lag a week like influenza-like illness (ILI) data. For the moment, this is the best representation of how a state is doing based on publicly available information.
What Data Is Missing?
Unfortunately, we cannot track how states are deploying contact tracing programs because that data is not reported yet. We also lack data sources for how states are implementing safe quarantine spaces. Once that data is available, we’ll incorporate it.
How Are States Progressing on Reopening?
Using a simple red, yellow, green scale, you can see the progress towards achieving the gating criteria.
How is the Disease Spreading?
What’s critical is a downward trajectory of illness reported and documented cases.
Can Our Health System Handle the Spread?
Bed and ICU availability, case fatality rate, and cases per capita are a proxy for load on our hospitals.
How Is My State Doing On Testing?
We track our country’s daily progress towards two goals: reaching 500K tests per day and 4 million tests per day. The targets for each state have been adjusted per capita.
Data & Sources
The data for this site comes from COVIDTracking.com (pulled at 10pm on 5/17), rt.live (pulled at 10pm on 5/17), the CDC (ILI pulled at 5pm on 5/13, ICU/bed occupancy pulled at 8:30pm 5/16), and NYT(pulled at 3pm on 5/15). The data powering the charts can be found in this Google Spreadsheet.
So we’re missing about 1/2 of the testing capacity we need. And our diagnosed case 14 day rolling average is trending the wrong direction. And we have no reported contact tracing capacity; which it is quite clear from reporting on this blog is woefully inadequate to the need. Even in the most vulnerable populations we are not doing sufficient testing or contact tracing. In short, you can expect an explosion of cases within two weeks of our opening. Mark the calendar and prep the ICUs.
For additional charts and graphs, see Kaiser Family Foundation “State Data and Policy Actions to Address Coronavirus”, https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/state-data-and-policy-actions-to-address-coronavirus/
searchable by national and state data.