Data in recent days show a slowdown in the rate of new coronavirus cases in several U.S. states, raising hopes that aggressive mitigation efforts such as social distancing and closures of schools and businesses are helping to tamp down the pandemic's grim toll.
But instead of relaxing those measures in the face of that potential good news, governors in those states are saying that their residents need to keep up the practices that might have led to the slowdown.
"If we stop what we are doing, you will see that curve change," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday.
Charts in this article reveal the rate of new coronavirus cases in each state and allow readers to take a closer look at what is going on in their own state by clicking on its image.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there were more than 402,900 total cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., with at least 13,007 related deaths.
The number of new cases in New York each day is the highest in the nation, although that tally in the Empire State has begun to fall.
States including New York have seen a reduction in newly reported cases of the virus, even as their death counts grow. New York on Wednesday reported 10,453 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of cases to date to 149,316. At least 779 new fatalities related to the virus were reported in the state, the highest single-day total so far.
Health officials have noted that the fatalities from the coronavirus reflect infections that occurred days or weeks earlier.
But many officials are focused on the rate of new cases as an indication of how fast the virus is spreading and how many more people could die, particularly if hospital systems are overwhelmed.
Other states seeing a marked slowdown in their rates of new cases include New Jersey, Louisiana, Maine, Ohio and Maryland, as well as Washington state, which was the site of the first large number of cases in the U.S.Â
At the same time, other states, such as Kentucky, Delaware and West Virginia, have seen upticks in their rate of new cases.Â
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose state saw its biggest single-day death total on Tuesday, said Wednesday that while the overall "hospitalization number is up ... the rate of growth in hospitalizations is in line with us being on a lower trajectory for case growth."
Edwards also said the use of ventilators on coronavirus patients had continued to slow, or even drop. He had said Tuesday that the state was no longer projecting that hospitals would run out of enough ventilators to treat patients in the following 10 days to two weeks.
"That means people won't die because they don't have a ventilator,"Â Edwards said Tuesday, according to the News Star newspaper.
Cuomo said Wednesday that social distancing measures adopted in his state are working, based on the data he has seen.
"There is good news in what we are seeing: that what we have done, and what we are doing, is actually working and it's making a difference," Cuomo said at a press conference. "It is flattening the curve."
But, he added, "It's not a time to get complacent, it's not a time to be doing anything different than we are doing."
Cuomo's neighboring governor, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, echoed that good news theme when he told CNBC's "Fast Money" a day earlier that it is "too early to tell, but we are seeing the positive cases that are coming out each day continue to show a little bit of a sign of flattening, and that's a good thing."
"And then we went through some modeling today, and the good news is that we don't have the runaway freight train catastrophe that we would have had if we had done nothing," Murphy said.
Here are snapshots of 49 states other than New York, and the District of Columbia:
