GOV. CHARLIE BAKER appears to be still holding out hope that he could start reopening the state on May 4, even though time is running short for that to happen.
At the end of March, Baker was forecasting that the COVID-19 surge would hit the state between April 10 and April 20, so he extended his order closing all non-essential businesses and advising everyone to stay at home. The order had been expected to sunset on April 7, and he extended it until May 4.
Now the COVID-19 surge has come, and Baker said on Friday that he believes it is currently at its peak. But the surge has developed more slowly than forecast, and there’s been no consistent trend lines yet indicating that it’s on the downturn.
Federal guidance for starting to reopen a state calls for a 14-day downward trajectory in either new COVID-19 cases or positive cases as a percent of total cases. The guidance also calls for hospitals to be operating without crisis care standards and have the ability to test their workers.
Massachusetts already meets the latter test for hospitals, but not the first one regarding cases.
May 4 is 10 days away, so there’s technically no way the state could meet the federal guideline calling for a 14-day downward trajectory.
On Friday, Baker refused to say what he intends to do about the May 4 date. He said he’s looking for a “significant number of days” where there is either a reduction in hospitalizations, a reduction in new cases, or some other criteria he didn’t specify.
The Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 dashboard for Friday, which was released 2 ½ hours late because of a backlog of 10,000 positive and negative test results that came in from Quest Diagnostics, yielded mixed results for those looking for a downward shift. The dashboard indicated the number of new COVID-19 cases overall rose by 4,946, but only 2,877 were assigned to Friday’s report; the rest were apportioned across several earlier reports. The upshot is that the number of cases declined from 3,079 on Thursday to 2,877 on Friday, but the two days were the two highest increases since the pandemic began.
There was better news on hospitalizations, which fell to 3,851, the second straight day of declines.
Baker said he didn’t have a crystal ball that could tell him what’s going to happen, so he’s going to wait and see. But he didn’t firmly adopt a 14-day timetable.
“The hard and fast answer is going to be in the trend data and I can’t predict what the trend data is going to be over the next five, six, or seven days,” he said. “We’re going to follow the data.”
Baker said on Thursday that reopening the state will rely less on May 4 the date and whether businesses are essential or non-essential. Instead, he said, the focus will be on some “rules of the road” that will determine what can and cannot be done given the situation on the ground. He said businesses that can comply with those rules would be allowed to open and those that can’t would have to remain shuttered.
