It’s now crystal clear… Arizona is back in a COVID-19 exponential growth curve The situation has deteriorated so quickly that Dr. Gerald put out two updates this week- the latest one this morning, View his report here.
For the week ending July 11th, 5813 Arizonans were diagnosed with COVID-19, a 48% increase from last week’s initial tally of 3842 cases. This marks the 5th consecutive weekly increase and a brisk acceleration over past trends. The current rate, 80 cases per 100K residents per week, is increasing by 25 cases per 100K residents per week.
For historical reference, the last time Arizona recorded this level of transmission on an upward trajectory was October 18, 2020 when 6330 cases were reported. Unlike the update earlier this week, which suggested slowly worsening conditions, this week’s change makes it likely that Arizona will soon experience cases rates >100 per 100K residents per week marking a transition from substantial to high levels of transmission. Rt is meaningfully above 1 and may remain so.
Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are also increasing. As of July 14th, 689 (9%) of Arizona’s 8648 general ward beds were occupied by Covid-19 patients, a 26% increase from the previous week’s 548 occupied beds. Twelve percent (12%) of Arizona’s 1737 ICU beds were occupied with Covid-19 patients, a 22% increase from the prior week’s count of 152 patients.
Editorial Note: At this point, Governor Ducey, Director Christ and a majority of the state legislature have tied the hands of virtually the entire state to the point where nobody is allowed to do virtually anything to slow the spread of COVID-19.
K-12 schools are prohibited from requiring masks on campus. Universities and community colleges cannot require masks nor can they have a student code of conduct that has different expectations for vaccinated and unvaccinated students. Cities and counties cannot have mask requirements in their jurisdictions. Vaccination requirements and requirements for vaccination records are prohibited. It’s like they have us in reverse lockdown.
I was in the room many years ago with Dr. Bob England, Susan Gerard and many others as we were developing the Bill that provided the public health emergency authority in ARS 36-787 et seq to the governor and state health director. Never in our wildest dreams did we think that a governor and a state health director would use that public health emergency authority for such harmful purposes.
Wow, were we wearing rose colored glasses!