Big Update: Daily New Cases

We’ve added a 5th metric to our COVID warning system: “daily new cases per 100K population” (also referred to by epidemiologists as “incidence”).

It answers the question: “how many new COVID infections are in my area?” Daily New Cases (Incidence) has changed the risk score for many states and counties.

This change may be disheartening, but we believe it is important for our COVID risk score to reflect risk as accurately as possible and adding this metric improves our ability to do so.

#Connecticut is the newest state to join others in green on our COVID risk map.

Cases are steadily decreasing and Connecticut’s COVID preparedness meets or exceeds international standards. In #Connecticut - on average, each person with COVID is infecting 0.75 other people.

Because each person is infecting less than one other person, the total number of current cases in Connecticut is shrinking.

Let's look at the contact tracing metric in action:

Per best avail data, #Pennsylvania has 160 contact tracers.

There are an avg of 822 new daily cases --> we estimate they need 8,220 contact tracing staff to trace all new cases in 48 hrs, before too many others are infected. This means that #Pennsylvania is likely able to trace only 2% of new COVID infections in 48 hours.

These low levels of tracing suggest there is either an active outbreak underway in #Pennsylvania, or almost no tracing capacity exists. Strong caution is warranted.

Covid Act Now is releasing new modeling for 3 metrics critical to help America Reopen *Safely.*

📈COVID Case Growth
🧪Testing Capacity
🏥ICU Safety Margin

#ReopenSafely #CovidActNow #StayHome Crucial Reopen Metric #1 = *Case Growth*

In order for a state to reopen safely, the number of #COVID cases should be decreasing.

That means the R-effective has to be less than 1.0