Substantial Spread No Longer Exists as a Category in Arizona
Over the summer, a host of stakeholders including the business community developed COVID-19 metrics to inform policy decisions like when it’s time to pause the operation of bars and have restaurants go to take out and outdoor dining. Shortly after the ideas were presented to the Governor’s Office, the ADHS quickly adopted the metrics and highlighted them as a key tool for driving future intervention decisions. Those metrics were then used when the state decided to lift the limitations put on bars, restaurants and gyms during the summer “pause”.
Under the former criteria bars and in-person dining are not allowed to operate when a county is in the Substantial category (based on more than 100 cases per 100,000 residents, more than 10% of people testing coming back positive, and more than 10% of people showing up at hospitals having COVID-like illness). We supported those metrics (although we pointed out that COVID-Like Illness is a very poor metric for decision-making).
As community spread began to increase in late October and into November & December, county after county moved into the Substantial spread category. When asked why the ADHS was not advocating for enhanced interventions because of the substantial spread, Dr. Christ (the agency director) said that while the metrics were valuable for deciding when to open businesses, they were irrelevant for deciding when to close them.
As that argument became increasingly untenable, Dr. Christ late last week quietly changed the standards governing business operations such that it is impossible to reach a threshold in which community spread is high enough to warrant enhanced interventions on bars and restaurants, no matter how serious the infection rate gets. Basically, Substantial Spread has been eliminated as a category.
If you don’t believe me, you can check it out for yourself. Go to the ADHS Business Dashboard. You can see that the state as a whole and all the counties are well into the Substantial Spread range in terms of cases per 100,000, percent positivity, and even COVID Like Illness.
Yet, the business reopening status is Moderate… meaning steady as she goes.
Astonishing.
