May 8 - COVID-19 in Westchester County, NY

Hospitalizations in Westchester continue to drop.  About 700 are currently hospitalized in a system with 3000 beds. This should be the trigger to loosen some of the restrictions in Westchester.  Unfortunately, the formula for starting the 'reopening' depends on seven metrics, at least one of which Westchester cannot reach for another 14 days. More on htat later. I do not have the hospitalization data for Westchester, but it looks much like that for NYC and the state of New York shown below.

2020-05-07 Hospitalizations in New York State

New Cases in Westchester are still dropping on a 7-day average, but there is a lot of day-to-day variation (red line). The trend has been following a linear decay (orange line) over the last seven weeks! Yesterday, the number of tests performed was almost double the average of the prior two days.  The more tests, the more new cases.

The percent-testing-positive is fairly independent of the number of tests.  That is why there is less noise in the data shown below. That is why I have often argued that the percent-testing-positive is a crude approximation of the prevalence in the community.  This means that about 10% of the Westchester population currently has the virus.  We know from antibody testing in Westchester that about 20% have recovered from the virus.  Therefore 30% have been exposed to the virus so far.  [There is data showing some recovered patients that do not have the antibody, so the number exposed could be even higher?] The percent testing positive may be starting to level out at 10%.  This is a level which the hospitals can handle.  The strategy was always just to SLOW the spread, NOT to STOP the spread.  Unfortunately, Governor Cuomo uses the latter terminology on ALL of his charts.  This sends the wrong message.

The number of deaths in Westchester for the last five days were: 19, 15, 15, 51, 17. The fifty-one number was a recategorization of nursing home deaths that occurred earlier in the epidemic.  It could be that yesterday's number also includes some deaths that did not really occur yesterday.  One of the metrics to reopen is 14 consecutive days of decrease in deaths.  A three-day-rolling-average is allowed to remove noise, but that is not enough to remove the noise in these data.  It looks like end of May at the earliest for reopening of Westchester.