In order to reopen states safely, federal guidelines recommend there be a decline in reported coronavirus cases for 14 consecutive days.
No state has met that benchmark so far, NBC News reports.
Several states have started to lift stay-at-home restrictions even as positive cases continue to rise across the country.
States like Georgia and Minnesota are reopening even though their new infection rates are ticking up, not down, according to NBC News.
Some states, such as Colorado and Kentucky, have reported fewer new cases in the past week, but they are still not close to hitting a 14-day decline in cases.
President Donald Trump announced the 14-day guideline on April 16.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the guidelines “make sense," during a media briefing Tuesday while acknowledging the economic dilemma. “We want to reopen, but we want to do it without infecting more people or overwhelming the hospital system.”
With a backlog of tests to process, the reports from the states do not always reflect patients who were diagnosed within the past 24 hours. But the daily case counts are still on the rise in many states.
Governors are deciding how to reopen to get the economy back up and running without risking public health.
"It's a delicate conversation,” Cameron Wolfe, an associate professor of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, told NBC News. "We are literally trying to find ways of coexisting with COVID that doesn't lead us back into a secondary surge in cases."
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