Ohio turns from modeling toll of pandemic

Flatten the curve. That was the plea in March as leaders warned that Ohio could reach as many as 10,000 new COVID-19 cases each day.

If no action was taken, initial models cautioned, Ohio would hit 62,000 new cases a day in mid-march. That number would have overwhelmed the state’s hospital system.

Closures, social distancing and other measures led researchers to predict a much smaller peak: about 1,600 new cases each day by mid-april.

Neither set of predictions materialized. The modelers attribute that, in large part, to Ohioans staying home and not coming in close contact with others.

Now, Gov. Mike Dewine has traded in flattening the curve for avoiding a red alert on the state’s new countyby-county map. That map is based on seven health factors, ranging from new cases per 100,000 residents to intensive-care-unit bed capacity.

“We’ve got a lot of different factors that weren’t available at the beginning of the pandemic,” Dewine spokesman Dan Tierney said.

The Ohio Department of Health isn’t doing modeling.

Ohio State University’s Infectious Diseases Institute, which generated the modeling shared during Dewine’s coronavirus briefings, still regularly provides forecasts, spokeswoman Katie Mcafee said. But OSU’S focus is providing context for pandemic data collected in Ohio and surrounding states.

The Cleveland Clinic is taking a different tack as well.

“Because conditions are continuously changing, we don’t believe we can solely rely on long-term results or a single methodology,” Cleveland Clinic spokeswoman Andrea Pacetti said. “Therefore, we are expanding our approaches to look at shorter-term trends, which can help us evaluate when a curve may be changing.”

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has offered some projections: Deaths in Ohio could total between 3,511 and 4,676 by the third week of August, according to a compilation of more than 20 models. As of Tuesday afternoon, the toll of 3,570 was already above the low end of that range.

Some of these forecasts assume that social distancing will continue at its current pace, while others anticipate changes.

Modeling continues across the country, but Ohio isn’t relying on it. Initial models weren’t based on widespread testing or far-reaching contact tracing of those who had been infected because the state didn’t have either capability at the time.

The new map allows Ohioans to watch as risk factors increase, moving from a yellow designation to the more serious orange or red, Tierney said.

“We do think that the public-health advisory system is meant to be forward-looking,” he said.

The map focuses on current numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations rather than future projections, which were hotly debated on social media. But the map doesn’t indicate when Ohio might hit its next COVID-19 peak.

As children return to school and parents return to work, everyone would love to know when this pandemic will finally end — something that neither a map nor a curve can predict.