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So the ADPH dashboard updated their 5/14 numbers sometime last night, and 5/14 is now the highest daily confirmed cases in the state. Perhaps that will be an outlier, but not a great sign in light of the restrictions being lifted this week. Not saying there is correlation there, but rather that that decision was possibly a bit premature, or too liberal. That of course remains to be seen.

The seven day average has flatlined over the last week or so, so hopefully that means we're at the peak.

In all honesty, total case and new case numbers are a direct function of testing and aren't very meaningful as we test more people who have few or no symptoms. From mid March through May 8, Alabama had performed 114k tests. Last week alone, we did 30k tests to bring that number up to 144k. The first six weeks of testing, we did 74k. In just over two weeks since, we've done 70k.

The test results were an overall 8.8% positive rate through the end of April. Since then, the positive rate is only 6.4%.

We are almost a month removed now from peak ICU and ventilator usage. UAB, the largest hospital in the state (and third largest public hospital in the country) is down about half in the COVID ICU since that peak. There are 1,903 ICU beds total in Alabama, not including new COVID expansions. We never came close to filling them (UAB peaked at 63 and sits around 35 at the last update I saw). It's very possible that a stay at home order to "flatten the curve" was never even necessary in Alabama, but we acted with caution, which is fine in the beginning. Cases might go up with this soft reopening, but I doubt our hospital capacity will be exceeded.

We are at a point now where we have a VERY good understanding of who is truly in danger from this virus. We can easily use specific, targeted measures to protect them and avoid further increasing the damage from the looming tidal waves of social, economic, psychological, and secondary health crises bearing down on us.

This post was edited on 5/16/20 at 11:38 am