Spread of COVID-19 in Tompkins County

I live in Tompkins County, in the Finger Lakes region of New York state (I'm currently not there, due to Covid, but I'll be back soon). The number of people who have tested positive for COVID is quite low - 148 out of a total of 8221 tests (as of today, May 22, 2020) - a rate of 1.8%, which i slow. Out of the positive tests, 124 have recovered. (See this chart from the Tompkins County Health Department). There is currently only person hospitalized for Covid, and two people have died in Ithaca of Covid (they were brought here from New York City). The charts in this post are from Covid Act Now, and this is their About page explaining who they are: https://covidactnow.org/about.

One of our 16 ICU beds is currently occupied by someone with COVID, and two are occupied by people with other ailments, leaving 13 unused, so if there a surge of COVID in the county, we do have some capacity to treat people.

Our infection rate, however, which was below 1 on May 4, rose to 1.5 on May 6, and is now about 1.46 (meaning that a person who has COVID is theoretically infection about 1.5 people). An infection rate below 1 means that the number of people who get the virus is steadily decreasing.

COVID Act Now, from which I am getting this information and the charts, says that "the total number of cases in Tompkins County, New York, is growing exponentially." (See chart below). Should we be worrying about this?

On the New York state tracker, the Southern Tier, which includes Tompkins County, has been given the go-ahead to cautiously start opening up, but below is the summary for Tompkins County from Covid Act Now. According to them the overall Covid risk is elevated (the highest level). I just checked all of the other counties in the state that they have sufficient data to give a score to, and Tompkins County has the highest infection rate in the state.

Further information:

The Ithaca Voice, a local online only publication, sends out a Covid-19 brief every day, including the daily report from the Tompkins County Health Department. They include useful graphs along with the TCHD report. These are the two latest ones, from today:

Our highest days of hospitalizations were throughout the month of April, and there's currently only one person hospitalized.

At the beginning, from mid-March up through early April, we had a pretty quick rise in cases, but it's been much slower since then.