Dr. Joe Gerald’s weekly epidemiology and hospital capacity report continues to show a runaway epidemic in Arizona. Here’s the full report. There are several revealing and troubling charts in this week’s report. I highly recommend reading it or at least reviewing the charts and graphs. Below is a quick summary:
Viral transmission is increasing throughout Arizona. New Covid-19 cases will overwhelm our capacity to provide hospital care in the next few weeks. New cases are being diagnosed at a rate of 567 cases per 100,000 residents per week, far into the substantial range.
This rate is increasing by approximately 179 cases per 100,000 residents per week. We have now all but locked in a hospital care crisis during the Christmas – New Year holiday with hundreds of preventable deaths per week.
Holiday travel, commerce, and social gatherings between Thanksgiving and New Years are likely to accelerate transmission rates without additional public health interventions.
A state-wide shelter-in-place order in addition to an enforceable statewide face covering mandate would be needed at this point to slow transmission and to mitigate the worst of overcrowding in our hospital system. This could likely have been avoided with better enforcement of required mitigation measures agreed to by bars and restaurants when the opened after the summer “pause”
Hospital Covid-19 occupancy has now exceeded the previous peak number of hospitalized patients and ICUs will set new records by the end of next week. Hospitals are already postponing scheduled procedures; essentially additional capacity is being created at the expense of others with serious non-Covid medical conditions. However, this coping mechanism will be exhausted by the end of the month.
Health professionals are being asked to work additional hours and assume new duties. Shortages and burn-out will degrade our capacity to provide critical care services over the coming weeks.
The test positive rate for traditional PCR testing reached 25% this week. The growing mismatch between testing capacity and demand indicates viral transmission is growing faster than estimated here.
Covid-19 mortality continues to increase. While case fatality rates remain lower than those observed with this summer’s outbreak, deaths are rising quickly. Arizona will record >500 Covid-19 deaths per week by Christmas.
