Testing capacity has gone up but in many places the percentage of positive cases - which accounts for the increase in testing - have stayed constant or even inc

Testing capacity has gone up but in many places the percentage of positive cases - which accounts for the increase in testing - have stayed constant or even increased. For example in the DC/VA/MD area there has been a plateau of approximately 20% of tests positive for several weeks now which is a true indication that the infection rate is constant, not increasing or decreasing and accounts for the increased number of tests being done. NYC has definitely decreased its percentage positive in the last month, as have others, but plenty of other places in the US have seen increases or a plateau. You can find plenty of covid trackers that had the listing of total tests and total positive to determine this percent (e.g. https://covidtracking.com/data https://covidtracking.com/data ). Generally epidemiologists, infectious disease control and other experts are saying under 10% positive is considered one good indicator that the infection rate is manageable and under control. Hospital beds, like percent positive tests, are only one metric for determining health care capacity and how close we are to having an outbreak that overwhelms the all resources needed by the health care system to properly function. Globally there is a shortage of the medication used for sedating which is used when doing intubation or another medical procedure that requires sedation. Globally there is a shortage of PPE. PPE is at an extreme shortage globally still, and without PPE you have a shortage of medical workers (who then get sick or potentially spread it to other patients who aren't covid patients) - without health care workers those hospital beds become pretty useless. A lot of the initial cases in Wuhan came from cross exposure of non covid patients to covid patients at the hospital so canceling elective surgeries And mandating PPE made sense to prevent hospitals from becoming infection hotspots. Why is everyone so hyper focused on hospital beds? They also literally canceled all elective surgeries as part of these stay at home orders which freed up something like 70% of beds that were being used. Additionally there aren’t as many trauma victims because car accidents, tourism, etc is down. They know severity of cases and poor outcome when contracting the disease comes from initial viral load - being in close, confined places with someone who has it for a substantial period of time increases the severity of the disease. This is true for this virus and has mountains of evidence behind it in the study of virology to be true in general with viruses. It’s increasingly important here because the virus has no treatments in terms of medications, severe cases seem to be complex and the progression of the disease from this virus is not well understood. These guidelines and requirements for wearing a mask in public and need for health care worker PPE is a large part of the effort to help people have a less severe case of the disease if and when they do get exposed. How myopic and superficial to not think about something more than hospital beds as a metric when evaluating these shutdown policies.