How Are States Across the U.S. Projected to ‘Flatten the Curve’?

—Every day, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. grows. On March 26, the country passed China to rise to the top of the list of most reported cases of the novel coronavirus in the world, and the spread of the illness shows little sign of abatement. However, the U.S. is a huge country, and the growth patterns of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, differ significantly from state to state. Researchers at the University of Washington recently analyzed these early trends, along with factors like how states are implementing social distancing, their hospital capacities, and their testing capabilities, and developed a projection of what the future holds for each when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic. The bottom line: the longer it takes for a state to reach its peak hospitalization and death rates, the lower those peaks. “It’s this whole flattening of the curve construct—that if you have slower transmission you slowly build to a lower peak,” says Dr. Christopher Murray, institute director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and professor and chair of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington. IHME’s statistical model is “picking up that pattern in the data and that’s what we’re projecting out,” says Murray TIME crunched the numbers to create two graphs, which, combined, suggest that “flattening the curve” appears to hold true for states as much as ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 interactive Source Type: news