Jon Dougherty 
We seem to be rounding the corner — or, in more common vernacular, ‘flattening the curve’ — on the coronavirus pandemic, which is a good thing considering that most of us have been living under a form of ‘stay-at-home’ order for weeks now.
First, the number of hospitalizations due to the virus at its U.S. epicenter, New York City, have fallen dramatically in the past few days, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Whereas just a few short weeks ago he was alternately criticizing and pleading with the Trump administration for 30,000 ventilators, he said Monday that hospital COVID admissions have fallen by 75 percent.
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Also, according to Cuomo’s office, New York won’t like need the 110,000 hospital beds previously claimed, either.
Highlighting the drop in new hospitalizations in NY, the state hardest hit (131,239 cases; 4,758 deaths as of Monday) by the coronavirus, Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter who has been following the U.S. outbreak closely, observed on Twitter on Monday: “It’s over, guys. It’s already over.”
The new forecasts show “a much lower demand” that stands in the estimated 20,000-30,000 range, Jesse McKinley, the New York Times bureau chief in the NY capital of Albany, wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Cuomo told reporters Monday that hospitalizations in his state dropped from 1,427 just four days ago to 358 on Sunday.
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Given all of this data, it means that the new hospital bed projections for The Empire State are between 70 and 80 percent fewer than the initial hysterical estimates.
Cuomo acknowledged on Monday that the decline in hospital admissions, along with other signs like the number of deaths from the virus staying flat, proves that the state and the city have turned a corner on the pandemic. Intensive care admissions are also down, he said.
The Epoch Times, citing figures in models created by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, which have been used by the White House, reported Sunday:
While tens of thousands are hospitalized across the United States due to COVID-19, the numbers are a fraction of what experts predicted just a few days ago. The main reason appears to be that the [IHME] projections were already off the day they were released.
Given that states with available data had a current hospitalization rate around 6 to 20 percent, if each of the no-data states had a rate of 20 percent, the hospitalizations for the whole country would add up to some 47,000 as of April 3 to 4.
That also means that the number of hospitalizations across the country earlier this month was also much less — only about 40 percent — than the IHME model predicted.
As the pandemic has played out, Trump administration officials have relied on often wildly inflated infection and death rates to set policies. For instance, those calculations have led most governors to impose strict “stay-at-home” regulations that are now beginning to result in fines and possible jail sentences.
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In addition, governors and mayors have used these inflated estimates to deem scores of businesses “non-essential” and order them closed, resulting in more than 10 million new unemployment claims in the past two weeks.
Trump has said he wants to “reopen” the country as soon as possible, and that the “cure can’t be worse than the disease” when it comes to coronavirus policies. Maybe now that curves are being ‘flattened,’ it’s time to start moving towards relaxing these policies so Americans can start earning a living again.