Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Valentine to New York City restaurants has left close observers of the city’s coronavirus data scratching their heads. Cuomo said Friday that “on our current trajectory,” New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14, typically a busy day for the restaurant industry.
As the governor spoke, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced an indefinite ban on indoor dining in December.
Average COVID-19 hospitalizations in the city, while trending downward, were still 60% higher late last week than they were when Cuomo closed the restaurants.
And the test positivity rate was more than 1 percentage point higher.
Cuomo has said that the decision to open any part of the economy is based on four metrics: new cases per capita, hospitalizations, the test positivity rate and the rate at which people are infecting one another.
That fourth measure, known as R(t), has improved for New York state since December and is now less than 1, meaning each infectious person will infect fewer than one other person. A state official said models used by the state put New York City’s R(t) between 1.03 and 0.95.
Gareth Rhodes, a deputy superintendent at the state Department of Financial Services and a member of the governor’s COVID-19 task force, said the important metrics are not where the numbers are but where they are headed — and that trends are all headed downward, both across the state and in the city.
He said the opposite was true in December, when trends suggested a climb in cases and hospitalizations.
Rhodes also noted that businesses began reopening in May even though more than 6,000 people remained hospitalized because trends indicated the numbers would improve and that they did.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention places on-site dining with capacity limits in the “higher risk” category for coronavirus transmission, with the highest risk being indoor dining without precautions. Cuomo’s plan to reopen indoor service on Valentine’s Day includes a 25% capacity limit and other restrictions.
New York City is at an extremely high risk level for coronavirus, according to an assessment by The New York Times and public health experts.
The decision to reopen indoor dining came amid growing criticism of the governor for scorning the expertise of public health officials over the advice of the business lobby.
Even the governor’s own virus data proved less rosy than he presented Friday, a review of the numbers shows.
Cuomo suggested test positivity rates for New York City had fallen by 30% with a chart depicting a drop using data points chosen from daily swings.
In fact, the numbers he presented — 7.1% and 4.9% — were the highest and lowest daily numbers in January to that point, extremes that did not exactly reflect the overall trend.
The daily test positivity data, when presented alongside a seven-day average to account for daily fluctuations, show a more modest 17% drop in test positivity, compared with the 30% drop in Cuomo’s chart.
The governor’s chart had other issues: The vertical axis wasn’t labeled and did not begin at zero, so, at a glance, it suggested that the latest positivity rate was closer to zero than it actually was. And the graph’s curve did not follow any underlying values between the two data points.
However you look at it, the positivity rate was still higher than it was Dec. 11, when Cuomo announced the ban on indoor dining. It has remained steady since.
Cuomo acknowledged Friday that emerging variants of the virus could affect the infection rates in the coming weeks, and said the state would keep a close eye on hospital capacity numbers to determine whether further closures may be needed.
“I understand all the possibilities,” he said. “And if there are facts, and if the facts change, then we will have a different situation.”
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