In the daily Ohio Governor DeWine press conference on Friday, I thought these two things were notable:
- Dr. Amy Acton revised upwards the modeling estimates of the daily peak number of new cases expected to occur in Ohio from 6,000 to 10,000.
- Governor DeWine said that modeling estimates for Ohio show a need for 2x to 3x the current hospital capacity at the peak period. Accordingly, Ohio is planning for 3x, even if that might end up being a high estimate - the emphasis is on having adequate capacity available at the peak, so they will use the 3x estimate instead of the 2x estimate. He said the planning phase is over, Ohio has created a small amount of additional time with it's Stay at Home initiative (i.e. the curve has been pushed out and flattened to some degree), and is now immediately moving into the building phase to create the 3x hospital capacity.
A note for point one above, a couple of days ago when a reporter was asking about the 6000 cases estimate, he asked what the time frame was for those cases, and was astounded, honestly astounded, when she replied "per day". He had to repeat the answer twice to make sure he was hearing the answer correctly. To me, it showed that even someone in the media hadn't yet fully grasped the scope of the numbers being discussed.