Red, Yellow, Green

Last night our governor provided more details on the phased reopening plan he announced earlier this week, which he plans to start May 8th. They're taking a "traffic light" approach.

The red/stop is the phase the entire state is in right now, with closures and restrictions. Life-sustaining businesses  and travel only, stay-at-home orders, schools closed, etc.

To reach the yellow/caution phase, the population (maybe this is by county?) needs to have an average of fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 individuals over the course of 14 days. In this phase, some restrictions will be lifted, but there will still be limitations like schools closed, restaurants open for takeout/delivery only, and retail stores must take precautions to protect staff and customers. They are recommending gatherings of no more than 25 people, gyms stay closed, etc. Working remotely and doing curbside pick-up from stores is still recommended as much as possible.

For the green/go phase, there is no benchmark set yet, but it would involve lifting the stay-at-home order but continuing to follow CDC guidelines about masks, avoiding large gatherings, etc.

And if infections start to increase again, regions will back to isolation and restriction again. The Department of Health is supposedly working on tracking and contact tracing to enable that sort of monitoring to happen ... I feel like we would also need more widespread testing capabilities for this to be able to work, too.

Right now, the May 8th date that was announced before is a target for the corner of our state where nobody lives 😂 and there are already few infections. As I suspected, since this is being done regionally, my more populous "hotbed" region will probably be under lockdown for much longer...