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Bourbon Street in the New Orleans French Quarter is empty and most businesses are closed during the coronavirus pandemic in New Orleans, Friday, May 8, 2020. Mayor LaToya Cantrell wants to turn the French Quarter and other city areas into pedestrian-only zones, the mayor said Wednesday. Speaking in town hall with The Times Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, Cantrell said she has asked a task force to study the idea of reshaping the French Quarter and other city areas to exclude vehicular traffic. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate) ORG XMIT: BAT2005091000010442

Gov. John Bel Edwards is expected to announce on Monday whether Louisiana has made enough progress suppressing the spread of the coronavirus to further loosen restrictions on businesses and gatherings.

But should the state move into Phase 2 of its reopening at the end of the week, it will likely do so without a full understanding of whether the relaxed restrictions that have been in place since the middle of May have allowed the virus to spread at an increased rate. And, perhaps critically, the state will already be days into a regime of looser restrictions before it is known whether parties or travel during the Memorial Day weekend resulted in new infections that could seed a new surge, epidemiologists and some health officials said.

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If the first phase of Louisiana’s reopening led to a surge in new infections, the majority of those cases won’t be diagnosed until after Gov. John Bel Edwards decides whether to move into Phase 2. Cases tied to Memorial Day weekend wouldn’t be expected to show up in state data until days after Phase 2 could start.

“I would personally rather see the governor keep us in Phase 1 for a week beyond what we are currently slated,” Tulane University epidemiologist Susan Hassig said. “I’d rather have some sense of whether Memorial Day really messed us up before we left Phase 1 rather than after we left Phase 1.”

That’s about the timeline New Orleans officials are using to decide whether to relax their own restrictions, which currently are tighter than the state’s -- a caution that owes in large part to the dramatic number of cases and deaths seen in the city in the early days of the outbreak.

“If we are more restrictive, it’s because we want to give ourselves as much data as possible,” said Jennifer Avegno, director of the city's  Health Department. “We understand that being more restrictive is a challenge, so we have to balance that with the economic realities. We’re working with the state; much of what they’re doing is very well grounded in guidelines, but we want to make sure we’re getting to it at the right pace.”

The Phase 1 reopening, which relaxed Edwards’ initial stay-home orders, started May 15. That decision came amid significant success in controlling the spread of the coronavirus, and allowed restaurants to reopen their dining rooms at reduced capacity, lifted prohibitions on hair and nail salons and generally eased the rules governing other businesses.

The limited reopening, however, came with the risk that more activity could reverse the improving trajectory the state has been on. Though there’s no evidence of that yet, experts say the relatively short amount of time that has passed and the relatively long time it takes for those infected to start showing symptoms means it's still too early to have a sense of whether that happened.

“It’s only two weeks at that point, and looking at the data, I do not know how the governor decides at that point,” said Dr. Susanne Straif-Bourgeois, an associate professor at the LSU Health Sciences School of Public Health and an expert in pandemics who has been consulting with the Edwards’ team.

The decision comes amid dramatic success in driving down the numbers of new cases of COVID-19 and deaths attributed to the disease in Louisiana. An average of 362 new cases were reported to the state each day over the past week, less than a quarter of the numbers being reported during the week of the state’s peak in early April.

Most of the state’s regions are also seeing their new case numbers decline, or at least plateau far below their peaks. The New Orleans area has been averaging fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 people a day, a fraction of its peak of nearly 130 cases per 100,000. The Baton Rouge and Lafayette areas and the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain are all also below 10 new cases per 100,000 residents per day, a metric used to determine whether growth has been relatively contained.

Louisiana Department of Health spokeswoman Aly Neel said in an email Saturday night that while the progress across Louisiana is not uniform, the state overall is "slowly moving in the right direction, and that is happening while we are ramping up testing and contact tracing throughout the state."

"Ongoing and close data inspection and analysis will be a key part of our COVID-19 response not just now but for the foreseeable future," she said.

Neel also stressed that should the governor decide to move into Phase 2 on Monday, it should not be taken as a sign that people should stop taking the precautions that have become commonplace since the start of the pandemic.

"Regardless of the ultimate recommendation and decision made Monday, we are not going back to normal," Neel said. "It will still be safer to be at home, and wearing a mask in public and staying six feet away from others is with us until we have a vaccine."

Still, epidemiologists warn the positive trends can change, either because of the earlier relaxation of restrictions or because of large "super-spreader" events in which large numbers of people are exposed to the virus at at a time.

“Just because things seem to be heading in the right direction doesn't mean that they’re going to continue to,” Hassig said.

It can take two weeks for someone who has been infected by the coronavirus to start exhibiting symptoms. That could mean that new infections acquired early in Phase 1 would just have started to show up in the days leading up to the governor’s announcement about Phase 2.

“Multiple people could very easily be starting some substantial chains of transmission that we’re not aware of yet,” Hassig said. “It’s one of those tensions of (figuring out) how long an interval we really need to assess it.”

The time it takes for new infections to become apparent could be compounded by a quirk of timing: the Memorial Day weekend fell just a week before Edwards will make his decision. While officials said they didn’t see much sign of major gatherings within Louisiana, there are concerns that throngs of people could have traveled to Gulf Coast beaches and been infected among the crowds there.

Edwards on Friday acknowledged the challenge that lag poses, but said he planned to make a decision over the weekend. He also noted that earlier concerns that Mother’s Day gatherings would spark a spike in infections proved to largely be unfounded.

“I will tell you that Mother’s Day weekend came, and I saw an awful lot of people who were visiting with mama and entire families came together, and I thought we might see a spike,” Edwards said. “We may have in a few places, but it didn’t turn out to be anything that was really terribly concerning.”

Public health concerns are also not the only factor. Edwards has received significant pushback on his statewide restrictions from Republican lawmakers, who had threatened to override his orders had the state not moved into Phase 1.

New cases alone are just one of the metrics in federal reopening guidelines. States are also expected to show they have enough hospital capacity to prevent the health care system from being overloaded, see a decline in hospitalizations and reports of symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19 and demonstrate that they are testing aggressively. On all those metrics, Louisiana is doing well.

That suggests that even if there is an uptick, the state would be able to handle those new cases and use contact tracing to isolate those who might be infected.

The same aggressive testing is not in place in some of the places that loosened restrictions prior to Louisiana, making it difficult to use their experiences as a guide. State like Florida, Georgia and Texas lifted their restrictions weeks earlier than Louisiana.

“None of those states are testing enough to really have a firm grasp of what their underlying case counts are,” Hassig said. “That makes it really difficult to disentangle what might be the impact, because you don’t have a reasonable baseline. It’s clear it’s not going down.”

Straif-Bourgeois said that regardless of the decision on Monday, eased restrictions will not mean a return to normal. For example, Phase 2 would likely raise limits on capacity at certain businesses, allowing restaurants to be filled to 50% of capacity rather than 25%, as long as they can maintain social distancing.

And Phase 2 will likely be much longer, and require more evidence that the virus is under control, before the state can remove more restrictions in a move to Phase 3.

Of course, all that will depend on people following guidelines about staying 6 feet apart, wearing masks and limiting interactions with others, she said.

“People should not get crazy and say we are in Phase 2, we’re done,” she said.

Editor's note: This story was updated on the evening of May 30, 2020, to include a comment from the Louisiana Department of Health.