The COVID-19 shutdown has almost everyone hunkered down in isolation with orders prohibiting social contact and allowing only essential trips outside of the home.
As reported Summit County Board of Health orders remain in place with a Stay-at-Home directive through April 30. Public Health Director Rich Bullough says realistically, most businesses or facilities will not reopen on May 1. Public health experts continue to evaluate data but Bullough says because of the lag time with people developing symptoms, the lifting of orders can’t happen all at once.
“The trends right now appear to be favorable, and that's really terrific news, but we know that if we ease up on things too quickly or in a random way, then we may end up finding ourselves back in a situation where we’ve got cases rising quickly.” Bullough says “The consequences of making a mistake in this are months long so we’re going to be very, very careful.”
Bullough says they’re looking for ways to safely allow businesses to reopen without sacrificing slowing the curve of new illness, sanitization practices or maintaining social distance.
“If businesses are able to identify ways moving forward. One of the things we want to do is to engage different components of the business sector in a conversation about what is realistic for them to do.”
Bullough anticipates most of the restrictions will still be in place on May 1 with some possible modifications. He says diseases like measles have a herd immunity from vaccines. This means about 90% of the population have immunity through the vaccine or having contracted the disease.
“We’re a long, long, long ways from that. If we were to get to say 80 to 90% of our community having either been exposed to COVID-19, built the antibodies to it and or have received a vaccine for it. Then it's business as usual. But I think we've all heard that a vaccine is, I think at best estimate, a year off and maybe longer. And we don't probably want 90% of our population getting this stuff and so the vaccine is a really important component to when we go back to normal life.”
He says, over time, normal life could resume to some degree even if a vaccine is not available.
“We’ve got specific indicators that includes some Information around spread and the rate of spread. It includes the relative number of new cases versus recoveries. It includes the evidence of slowing spread and then some threshold number and we don't know what that is yet, where you're not seeing a lot of new cases.”
Bullough says the total number of cases doesn’t include many recoveries because it’s too early in the spread of the virus. He says at some point, daily counts will show more people recovering than contracting COVID-19. But that’s not the case now.
“We’re now beginning to get some information relative to recovered cases. And this is a rough estimate but right now we're estimating somewhere in the ballpark of 50 recovered cases. So, once you begin to remove that from the curve you can compare the number of recovered cases per day to the number of new cases per day.” Bullough says “when that flattens out, that's what we're talking about, this pandemic leveling off.”
Summit County has had some days with 30% of tests taken coming in as positive compared to the state’s average of about 5%. He says recently, the positive test rates have been 7.5%. Bullough says the testing data is improving and the recent drop in positive cases is encouraging and an indication that social distancing works.