Sometimes you just have to let the numbers speak for themselves

Well, you can do that if you keep in mind that there are three key numbers:

• The test positivity rate
• The total number of positive test recorded
• Number of new hospitalizations

And, you also keep in mind that what is important is not only the numbers themselves but also if the numbers are increasing, staying stable or decreasing – “the trend”. But a good rule of thumb is: if the test positivity ratio is above 10% and any one of the three numbers listed above is increasing, you are well and truly screwed. If it is above 10% and the numbers are stable, things are just really bad – think of the difference between a fire that is burning that you aren’t putting out, versus a fire that is out of control and threatens to burn just about everything down.

Also, ideally, you want to look at smoothed numbers like the seven day moving average. (A daily moving average simply means you take an average of a certain number of past days rather than use the number from today. This is especially important for things like testing because a moving average prevent daily spikes because the amount of testing done on weekends is often different than that done on weekdays. This makes it easier to tease out “signal from noise”.)

Anyway, here are the numbers for the worst hit states as of my writing this (with my interpretations of the trend). This information is taken mostly from the amazingly useful Johns Hopkins site which uses 7 day moving averages for the test positivity ratio: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states. (Unfortunately, the CDC site https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html which is the best source of hospitalization data lags by almost two weeks, so I haven’t bothered including that information in the table below.)