Email reply as a sign of committee pass?

[elasticegg]

Hi

This is my first time applying for grad school. 

I emailed several professors, and thankfully, some of them kindly replied.

Common statements were

"You look like a good fit"

"We have PhD opening, mention me as PI in SOP"

"I highly encourage you to reply"

The problem is that, from what I know, all of the programs I apply are committee-based, meaning that the committee first screens out

individual PIs hold the applicants and then the interviews.

Would getting positive replies indicate a good sign of passing the committee stage? 

I am not too certain if I should broaden my program choices and send more contact emails at this time of the year...

Positive email reply so far (Number of PIs replied): 

MIT-Harvard MEMP: 2

MIT EECS: 1 

Stanford Biomedical Data Science: 2 

Yale CBB: 1 

Berkeley Computational Health: 1

Johns Hopkins Health Informatics: 1

(Other programs w/o email sent ) : Harvard BMI, NYU BMI, Columbia BMI