Substantial Spread Effectively No Longer Exists as a Category for Informing Interventions
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 impose additional operational restrictions on bars and restaurants. Shortly after the ideas were presented to the Governor’s Office, the ADHS adopted the metrics and highlighted them as a key tool for driving future intervention decisions.
The metrics were then used when the state decided to lift the limitations put on bars, restaurants and gyms during the summer “pause”.
The protocol was scrapped in mid-December to ensure that the state metrics never suggest additional operational restrictions are needed at bars and restaurants no matter how bad community spread gets.
Here’s a story from the Health Arizona Daily Star that describes the decision by Dr. Christ to scrap the business metrics and her rationale for doing so.
Under the former criteria, bars and in-person dining are not allowed to operate when a county is in the ‘Substantial’ category.
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 and protocol were valuable for deciding when to open businesses, they weren’t useful for deciding when to close them or to impose additional operational restrictions.
As that argument became increasingly untenable, the agency changed the standards governing business operations such that it’s 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.
