Cuomo is reopening restaurants, despite the terrible number of Covid-19

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Valentine to New York City restaurant left watchers watching the city’s coronavirus data scratching its head. Cuomo said on Friday that “on our current trajectory,” New York City could reopen indoor meals on February 14, a typically busy day for the restaurant industry.

As the governor spoke, the average per capita case count in New York City was 64% higher than when he announced an indefinite ban on indoor dining in December.

The average hospitalization for Covid-19 in the city, although with a downward trend, was still 60% higher at the end of last week than when Cuomo closed the restaurants.

And the rate of positivity of the test was more than one percentage point higher.

Cuomo said the decision to open any part of the economy is based on four metrics: new cases per capita, hospitalizations, the test’s positive rate and the rate at which people are becoming infected.

This fourth measure, known as R_t has improved in the state of New York since December and is now less than 1, which means that each infectious person will infect less than another person. A state official said the models used by the state put those in New York City R_t between 1.03 and 0.95.

Gareth Rhodes, an assistant superintendent of the state’s Department of Financial Services and a member of the governor’s Covid-19 task force, said the important indicators are not where the numbers are, but where they are going – and that trends are all falling, both across the state and in the city.

He said the opposite occurred in December, when trends suggested an increase in cases and hospitalizations.

Mr. Rhodes also noted that companies began to reopen in May, although more than 6,000 people remained hospitalized because trends indicated that the numbers would improve and that they did.

The CDC places on-site meals with capacity limits in the “highest risk” category of coronavirus transmission, with the highest risk being indoor meals without precautions. Mr. Cuomo’s plan to reopen internal service on Valentine’s Day includes a 25% capacity limit and other restrictions.

New York City is at an extremely high risk for coronavirus, according to an assessment by The New York Times and public health experts.

The decision to reopen in-house restaurants came amid growing criticism of the governor for disregarding the expertise of public health officials in relation to the corporate lobby board.

Even the governor’s own virus data was less optimistic than Friday’s, shows a revision of the numbers.

Mr. Cuomo suggested that the test’s positivity rates for New York City fell 30 percent with a graph showing a drop using data points chosen in daily fluctuations.

In fact, the numbers he presented – 7.1 percent and 4.9 percent – were the highest and lowest daily figures for January up to that point, extremes that did not exactly reflect the general trend.

Here are the positivity data from the daily test, presented along with an average of seven days to account for daily fluctuations. The averages show a more modest 17% drop in test positivity, compared to the 30% drop in the Cuomo chart.

The governor’s chart had other problems: the vertical axis was not labeled and did not start from zero, so, at first glance, it suggested that the last positive rate was closer to zero than it actually was. And the graph curve did not follow any underlying values ​​between the two data points.

Either way, the rate of positivity was still higher than on December 11, when Cuomo announced a ban on indoor dining. It has remained stable since then.

Cuomo acknowledged on Friday that emerging variants of the virus could affect infection rates in the coming weeks, and said the state will keep a close eye on the hospital’s capacity figures to determine whether more closures may be needed.

“I understand all the possibilities,” he said. “And if there are facts, and if the facts change, we will have a different situation.”

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