COVID-19: Is any State Ready to Reopen?

5 min readApr 23, 2020

A week ago I wrote for COVID-19 for the first time, wondering if we had reached a plateau in the rate of new deaths per day. Since then the numbers have bounced around enough to make me worry about a double-peak, at least in certain states. This concern is reinforced by the pressure in certain states to “reopen” their economies and stop social distancing. We know from the experience in Singapore that reopening too early can lead to a resurgence of cases.

Looking at new cases and deaths by US state we can see that some look like they are coming down fairly consistently, a few are showing signs of double peaks, and some are still climbing. It is worrisome that no US state has shown a consistent decline in both new cases and deaths over a two week period.

Having looked at this data for several weeks now I can only say that it’s messy. There’s a sense of hope on weekends but that’s only because the people who report the numbers for the states often don’t work on weekends. The numbers issued on Tuesdays tend to spike as the reporting catches up. This is why I use 7-day moving averages for all the daily data points in the charts below.

There are also multiple versions of the national numbers. Some dashboards include several thousand additional deaths which were assumed to be COVID by New York. For example as of this instant the New York Times COVID dashboard is showing 42,353 total US deaths whereas the Domo dashboard is showing 47,702.

This post only contains data for a subset of the 56 US states and territories. You can peruse the results for all states by looking at the notebook used to create them on GitHub.

States Past Their Peaks

New York has been by far the hardest hit state with an even higher mortality rate so far than Spain and Italy. Fortunately the number of new cases, new deaths, and the number of people currently in the hospital are all declining. However at ~500 deaths and over 5000 new cases per day it is nowhere close to being able to reopen.

Louisiana is also past its peaks in new cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. More than 50 deaths per day is still a pretty high rate however.

Michigan was in the news this week due to astroturf protests. Things are looking slightly better but over 100 people per day are still dying there.

The COVID Tracking Project doesn’t have hospitalization data for Hawaii but it is looking better as well. It is one of the states that could probably reopen the soonest, at least for locals. Accepting potentially contagious visitors from all over the US and the world would be highly risky.

Missouri is only just coming off of its peaks.

The crisis looks to be almost over in Alaska:

Florida is past its peak in new cases but close to its peak in daily deaths. Some of the beaches are being reopened so we’ll see soon if that causes a second peak. (The COVID Tracking Project has no hospitalization or recovery data for Florida so that’s why the 4th chart below is blank.

States at a Plateau

A larger list of states have new case and/or death rates that have plateaued but where numbers are not coming down consistently.

New Jersey is the second-worst hit US state. It has reached a plateau of new cases and possibly in new deaths as well. Hospitalizations are coming down slightly. The state is testing over 6000 people per day.

Colorado has been at a plateau in all its metrics for several weeks. This didn’t stop astroturf demonstrators from demanding the state reopen.

States Experiencing a Second Peak

While California has managed this crisis better than most states, it is by no means out of the woods. It looked to be doing better for awhile but most metrics are now climbing again. The huge spike in testing in the lower right chart is a bit suspect.

Indiana is another example of a state where things were looking better only for COVID-19 to return strongly. The good news is that the number of patients in an ICU and/or on a ventilator are coming down steadily.