WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump name-dropped Arizona early in Thursday’s presidential debate, claiming the “very big spike” in COVID-19 cases in the state is “now gone.”
Except that it’s not.
New cases are up – twice in the past week they topped 1,000 – the rate of positive tests rose as did hospitalizations – although currently well within the current capacity of hospitals. That led Arizona Department of Health Services director, Dr. Cara Christ, to caution Arizonans on Thursday, “Don’t let down your guard.”
“Over the past few weeks in Arizona, reported cases and percent positivity have been increasing,” Christ wrote in the blog post that went up about an hour before the presidential debate started.
Trump brought up Arizona – and Texas and Florida – early in the debate, when he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden were asked how they would lead the country “during this next stage of the coronavirus.”
“There was a spike in Florida, it’s now gone,” Trump said. “There was a very big spike in Texas, it’s now gone. There was a very big spike in Arizona, it’s now gone. There were some spikes and surges in other places, they will soon be gone.”
While all three states have seen infections drop from spikes earlier in the year, all three are also seeing cases climb again, often sharply, as winter begins.
The Florida Department of Health reported more than 5,000 new cases on Wednesday and the Texas Department of State Health Services reported more than 5,900 new cases on Thursday.
Arizona had been a national hotspot for coronavirus infections this summer before seeing steady decreases in recent months. But the trend started to turn a few weeks ago, when the health department reported an increase in the percent positivity, an indicator of increasing community spread.
AZDHS has also reported a steady increase in new infections over the last month. The seven-day average of new cases rose from 502 cases in the first week of October to 688 per day the following week and 796 cases per day last week. The average stood at 946 for the first five days of this week.
“Everyone in the whole country knew, for about a month, Arizona was the worst,” said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association. “Not only the worst state in the whole country in terms of cases per capita, but we had the biggest issues within our hospital system in terms of capacity, and we might have even been the worst in the world. Arizona was in headlines for a month.”
With the rising infection rate, Arizona hospitals are also worried about a possible uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations. Currently, COVID-19 patients occupy 9% of hospital beds in the state, up from just a few weeks ago, but Christ said hospitals still have “capacity in their inpatient and intensive care unit beds and ample ventilator availability.”
To keep hospitalizations stable, Holly Ward, communications director from Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, echoed Christ, urging Arizonans to follow public health guidelines to check the spread of the disease.
“We are keeping a very close eye on the data and continue to encourage the use of facial coverings when you aren’t able to properly socially distance yourself from others, staying home when sick and following public health guidance to keep our Arizona communities as healthy as they can be during this pandemic,” Ward said in an email.
Despite the fact that overlapping flu and holiday seasons provide a recipe for spreading COVID-19, Humble said that updated mitigation strategies enforced by the state, along with normalization of masks, can keep the state from reaching the high case numbers that would mirror July.
“At least many, if not most, of the counties have face-covering ordinances, and face coverings have been a lot more normalized than they were back in June,” Humble said Friday. “At least now there’s some modest enforcement of the mitigation measures by the state.
“I think it could be a lot more robust than it is, but that’s a difference between now and June,” he said.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2020.
Have you been out on the Tucson streets lately, especially after the sun goes down?
And before anyone jumps on me for being out and about, I’m still working one of those so-called essential jobs that involves shift work and requires me to commute daily across Tucson quite a bit.
Forget about any potential local super-spreader events as a threat during this still very active pandemic. Let’s talk about the micro-spreaders that sit at home watching FOX all day listening to the echo chamber that enables the super-spreader in chief to fly around the country and claim the pandemic is a hoax — even after he caught it — and bad mouth anyone who is still trying to hold the line — even though his own staff has publicly admitted to giving up (surrendering) any semblance of compliance to the CDC guidelines inside the White House.
The micro-spreaders, who either get drunk or high or both, hop in their cars as the sun goes down, F the mask, roll down all the windows, crank-up the tunes and go flying down Tucson streets weaving in and out of traffic like they are bumper cars at the state fair. Forget about traffic lights and signs. These people have somewhere, anywhere to go and they haven’t got time to wait for anything or anyone.
And my favorite, the packs of motorcycles riding together like something out of a Mad Max film flying down the streets, swarming vehicles and clogging intersections, many without helmets or masks, defying Death and inviting it along for a midnight ride to nowhere. I even had one of these groups come upon me out of the darkness on the stretch of Kolb road that sinks low and cuts across the Davis-Monthan Bone Yard, passing on the left and right heading toward one of the most dangerous intersections around near Kolb and Valencia — just ask the police.
I get it. People are on edge. Between the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy and the 2020 election, which has been running 24/7 since 2016 on the boutique news channels, it would be enough to make anyone a little anxious — OK, A LOT ANXIOUS!
But seriously, we have enough on our collective plates now without adding to it by throwing all caution and semblance of control out the window. We know what we must do to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Most of us know what the rules of the road are — except those Tucson drivers who drove like this before the pandemic (you know who you are Karen) — and we can’t seriously be talking about sacrificing children and school staffs because it would provide a sense of normalcy amid the chaos our lives are now.
It is a lot to ask, but our grandparents held it together through a depression and two world wars and they did that without the internet, Netflix, Doordash and Amazon!
Let’s cowboy-, cowgirl-up Tucson and show the people in Washington, D.C. how we can fight this thing and LIVE with our boots AND our masks on!
Take two steps towards the ovens.
The average daily deaths for the last five days? Four.
That’s fewer than the number of people who will die from the flu over the course of a year.
How many stories has the Range and Tucson Weekly written about the dangers of the flu over the last five years? Zero.
Keep fanning the embers of panic. You have another five months, at most and this fashion will be totally out of style. People will no longer have any interest or hardly even tolerate public discussion of Covid deaths or risks.
Even during the Bubonic Plague, which had a case fatality rate of 80% and an overall death rate of 60% as compared to Covid-19’s puny, current two-tenth of one percent and one-tenth of one percent, life returned to normal after a year.
Has anybody noticed there are no flu deaths this year? Or are they also entered as Covid fatalities?
Before anyone else has a chance to try to rewrite this history, let’s go through the basic facts.
1. At the beginning of the pandemic, for many weeks Tchump did essentially nothing but pretend that the virus was “Totally Under Control” and would go away, like magic. Stream this film at The Loft if you want that story: https://loftcinema.org/film/totally-under-…
2. Gov. Douchey did the same, because he is nothing but a Tchump bot. In fact, he did less than nothing–he refused to let cities and other jurisdictions mandate their own rules, because he wanted Arizonans to march in lockstep with the presidential fantasy that it wasn’t a big deal. He literally sacrificed Arizonans to prop up Tchump’s political ambition and advance his own career.
3. When the inevitable catastrophe followed, killing thousands of Arizonans, it was the “Democrat-run cities” in Arizona that finally escaped state control and mandated masks, and THAT was what brought the numbers down, saving thousands of lives despite the political interference, ineptitude and corruption of the state and federal administrations.
At the very least, Tchump and Douchey are guilty of negligent manslaughter, if not worse. Yes, the virus would have killed people no matter what. And no, the virus would not have killed nearly as many people if we had had some real leadership to confront it.