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The goal is not to keep score, a pandemic is not a game, the goal is to end the pandemic.
A simple analogy that most people would understand is job performance, claiming that the only thing that matters is quantity over time not current performance would not choose the most productive individuals. Most conservatives have issues with that in the case of education, where compensation is based on length of service and education but not performance.
In order to end the pandemic looking at totals will do little, some think it will work to achieve political ends, but it did not in the recent California recall election.
Risk levels & key metrics
Covid Act Now uses six key metrics to assess COVID across U.S. states, metros, and counties. Three of these—daily new cases (incidence), infection rate (RT) and positive test rate—assess a location's overall risk level. The other three—ICU capacity used, % vaccinated and vulnerability—reflect a location's ability to protect itself and recover from COVID. Below, learn more about each metric and how it is assessed.
How COVID risk is determined
A state or county’s overall risk level takes into account three metrics: daily new cases per 100K (incidence), infection rate (Rt), and test positivity.
Daily new cases, also known as “incidence” in epidemiology, represents the current amount of COVID in a community.
Infection rate is the direction and speed of growth. For instance, daily new cases may be low, but if infection rate is high, then we know that daily new cases will be high in the near future.
Positive test rate is a measure of our confidence in the underlying data. For instance, if daily new cases and infection rate are both low, but test positivity is high, then the lack of sufficient testing suggests that we are not capturing the true levels of COVID and both daily new cases and infection rate are actually higher than what is currently reported.
Each metric has the following levels: green, yellow, orange, and red. Incidence is the only metric for which there is a dark red, a fifth color we added after the third surge in winter 2020, in order to capture unprecedented case counts.
If a region’s daily new cases is green, then its overall risk level is green. For instance, if the daily new cases metric is green, but test positivity is yellow, the overall risk level is still green. Otherwise, a region’s overall risk level reflects the highest risk level across all three metrics. For instance, if daily new cases and test positivity are both yellow, but infection growth is orange, then the overall risk level is orange.
The end goal is for regions to reduce cases to zero, to fully reopen their economies, and for people to resume normal lives, unrestricted by COVID or containment measures.
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