Thursday, January 6, 2022
A new report released by state health officials found that unvaccinated Arizonans are 31 times more likely to die of COVID-19 and nearly five times more likely to test positive for the virus than their unvaccinated counterparts.
“This is a big change from October, when the unvaccinated were 15.2 times more likely to die from COVID-19 and 3.9 times more likely to get the disease,” Arizona Department of Health Services Director Don Harrington said in a blog post about the report.
This is the second report released by the state health agency with similar findings recently to highlight the effectiveness and importance of the free vaccination program.
Only about 59% of Arizona’s population has received at least two doses of the vaccine, with the vast majority of those being people between the ages of 20 to 44 and 65 and up, according to ADHS data.
“It’s free, safe, widely available, and, as the evidence clearly shows, highly effective,” Harrington said in his blog post about the recently released data.
As the highly infectious omicron variant causes the state to see the sharpest increase in cases it has seen yet during the pandemic, experts and public health officials such as Harrington are continuing to stress the importance of the vaccine as well as boosters for those who have already been vaccinated.
Preliminary results in places like the United Kingdom, which has been grappling with the omicron variant, has shown that those who get booster shots have a 70-to-75% protection against symptomatic infection from the omicron variant.
“There simply is no arguing with the data: COVID-19 vaccines and boosters save lives,” Harrington said.
Arizona reported 7,749 new cases of COVID-19 and 61 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the state’s total number of people infected since the start of the pandemic to more than 1.4 million and more than 24,500 dead, according to AzDHS data.
Anyone seeking a vaccination can find vaccine information online for Maricopa County here and statewide here.
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WASHINGTON – COVID-19 claimed almost 15,800 lives in Arizona this year, putting it on track to be the leading cause of death in the state in 2021.
Official mortality numbers will not be available for months, but the other top causes of death in the state, cancers and heart disease, have each killed around 12,000 people in recent years. The exception was 2020, when heart disease claimed 14,185 lives in the state.
The Arizona Department of Health Services reported an unofficial total of 24,229 COVID-19 deaths in the state as of Dec. 31. With 8,430 of those deaths coming in 2020, according to a preliminary state report on vital statistics for that year, that would leave 15,799 deaths from COVID-19 in 2021.
“That’s a lot of deaths and deaths are hard to be mistaken about,” said Dr. Joshua LaBaer, executive director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. “A death is a death, there’s no misdiagnosis there.”
The surging COVID-19 numbers are a change from 2020, when the virus was the third-leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
LaBaer said that while it does not surprise him that COVID-19 could be the leading cause of death in the state, he is surprised by the number of deaths that occurred after the roll-out of vaccines early this year. COVID-19 killed more than 42 people a day on average in 2021, up from a daily average of just under 26 a day in 2020.
It's probably wishful thinking ... All about Hell Week ... And a Tennesseean lawmaker we wish lived here instead.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, joined by County Recorder Stephen Richer, went through the Cyber Ninjas’ report beat by beat for more than five hours yesterday, and the county released a 93-page report debunking all but one claim made by the Ninjas.
It took the county more than three months to issue its detailed response, but the results are thorough. The county’s elections department declared 22 of the Ninjas’ claims misleading, 41 inaccurate and 13 outright false. The full report, called “Correcting the Record,” is available on the county’s website.
Throughout the lengthy hearing, Richer, and less frequently a supervisor or two, made pointed remarks about the Ninjas and the Arizona Senate for perpetuating false claims about the 2020 election, while elections experts with the county addressed the specifics of allegations about Sharpies, signature verification, duplicated ballots and more. We won’t go through each claim here, but the Republic’s Jen Fifield has a rundown of some of the big ones.
The county did find a handful of cases of potential voter fraud — mostly people allegedly forging their deceased spouses signatures to vote on their behalf — as happens every year, and forwarded the cases on to the Attorney General’s Office for investigation and possible prosecution.
As the hearing wrapped, Supervisor Bill Gates, who was chosen as the new chairman yesterday, said the county needed to move on and focus on upcoming elections.The one allegation against election officials that the county agreed was accurate: 50 ballots were indeed scanned and counted twice, Elections Director Scott Jarrett said, noting that this did not affect a single race. It was an “honest mistake” made by a temporary county worker, he said.Out of 53,304 ballots claimed questionable by the #azaudit cyber ninjas, @MaricopaVote will be forwarding 32 for further investigation by @GeneralBrnovich after a 3 month long investigation.
— The AZ - abc15 - Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) January 5, 2022
WASHINGTON – Almost two years after the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in Arizona, new infections in the state have reached a “bizarre plateau,” rising from summertime lows in the hundreds to more than 3,100 new cases a day through the fall.
And experts said they don’t expect that to change anytime soon, as long as vaccine hesitancy continues and new variants keep cropping up.
“It’s here, it’s not going away,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
After peaking at close to 7,700 cases a day in January 2021 – with several days that month topping more than 10,000 new cases – the number of infections plummeted in Arizona, as vaccines became widely available, to just less than 500 a day in June.
But they started climbing in July and have been rising since, averaging more than 3,400 cases a day through November and December, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services, with 7,720 reported on Friday alone. The White House said Wednesday that Arizona is one of the states that will be getting help from Federal Emergency Management Agency paramedics – 20 on Christmas Eve and another 40 next week – to help handle the growing caseload.
“It’s pretty clear, at least for the time being that Arizona is, it’s not a surge, it’s certainly sort of a bizarre plateau,” said Dr. Joshua LaBaer, executive director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute.
“And looking at other places like the U.K. and parts of Europe, a lot of them are experiencing what we are experiencing, which is that they came down from this really high peak, but they haven’t really come down all the way and they
’re not staying down,” he said.
One reason that COVID-19 numbers do not go all the way down is the arrival of “very aggressive variants,” first the delta variant in spring and more recently the omicron variant. The second reason, he said, are the relatively large number of unvaccinated people in Arizona, who provide a pathway for those variants to spread.
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
More Ducey money for COVID-19 school closures ... The election "audit" news is never-ending ... And an unexpected Bruce Willis aside.
As students return to classrooms following the winter break, and lawmakers return to the Capitol following their long summers, education is again at the forefront of the political agenda.
So far, lawmakers have mostly stuck to hot-button topics like requiring written parental permission to join LGBTQ student clubs, picking on trans kids in sports and otherwise, and teaching kids to denounce communism.
We’re still waiting to see a bill that addresses the much bigger issue of the constitutional cap on school spending that’s screwing schools out of $1.2 billion in funding that they already have because enrollment was artificially low last year during the pandemic. Lawmakers need to suspend that cap by March, or schools budgets will be thrown into chaos.
But Republican lawmakers are hesitant to raise or suspend that cap because doing so would undercut their legal arguments against Proposition 208, the 2020 Invest in Education initiative, which increases taxes on high earners to pay for education and is still working its way through the courts.
And while lawmakers are largely focused on sex, communism and sports, Gov. Doug Ducey announced a new “preemptive action” yesterday to pay parents to take their kids elsewhere if schools close.
Ducey set aside $10 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to give parents up to $7,000 to cover child care, school transportation, online tutoring and even private school tuition if they meet income requirements and their school or classroom closes “even for one day.”
We’re making sure in-person learning remains an option for all Arizona families and students. That’s why we’re taking preemptive action and launching the Open for Learning Recovery Benefit. 1/
— Doug Ducey (@dougducey) January 4, 2022
Karamargin emphasized that Ducey has long been a proponent of the public education system. But he couldn’t say if Ducey plans to use his State of the State speech Monday to advocate for increasing the spending cap that has schools worried about future layoffs.It’s a lot like the plan he announced at the beginning of the school year to pay families to change schools if their school requires masks. That proposal also set aside $10 million, or $7,000 per student, and the Governor’s Office told us has doled out $600,000 so far. (For the math-challenged, that’s about 100 kids in a state with more than a million students.)
“Our expectation and our hope is that Arizona schools will remain open to the greatest extent possible. And many of them are sincerely working toward that goal,” Ducey spokesman C.J. Karamargin told us, adding that there’s a broad consensus among educators and politicians, including President Joe Biden, that schools should remain open.
Friday, December 17, 2021
Omicron is in Pima County.
Local health officials announced a positive test of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 on Thursday, Dec. 16.
According to a Pima County Health Department press release, the individual who contracted the variant tested positive for COVID in early December. Genetic sequencing later revealed it was the Omicron variant and its findings were verified by the Arizona Department of Health Services 24 hours later.
"We knew it was a matter of when, and not if, Omicron would be in Pima County," said Pima County Health Department Director Dr. Theresa Cullen in a press release.
There is speculation the Omicron variant causes less severe symptoms than the original virus and the Delta variant, but more research is needed to accurately determine the variant’s severity. Thus far, it is clear Omicron is more transmissible than the original virus.
The high transmissibility of Omicron will most likely lead to more infections and break out infections in vaccinated people. COVID vaccines with an additional booster shot should effectively protect people from severe illness and death caused by Omicron, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Pfizer-BioNTech released preliminary results from a non-peer-reviewed study showing the Pfizer COVID-19 two-dose vaccination series will somewhat neutralize the Omicron variant, but three doses are most effective.
“Getting the vaccine is highly effective in preventing serious illness and death, including against the variants,” Cullen said. “If you have been vaccinated, get boosted to stay protected. And follow the other layered mitigation strategies—wear a mask in public indoor spaces, wash your hands frequently and physically distance."
The high transmissibility of the Omicron variant threatens to further overwhelm Arizona healthcare systems.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Banner Health, Arizona’s largest healthcare system, reported hospital inpatient numbers are at the highest level since the start of the pandemic during a Dec. 14 press conference.
Banner Health Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Marjorie Bessel begged the public to get vaccinated ahead of the holiday season during Tuesday’s press conference. Bessel said some Banner hospitals are operating above 100% capacity.
“Currently, COVID patients account for 36% of our ICU (Intensive Care Unit) patients,” Bessel said.
She added that 88% of those COVID ICU patients are unvaccinated "and half of our patients on ventilators are COVID positive.”
Although COVID patients aren’t the only people filling hospital beds, unvaccinated people are more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people. The Arizona Department of Health Services recently released a report showing unvaccinated Arizonans were 3.9 times more likely to test positive for COVID and were 15.2 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than vaccinated Arizonans.
It’s been exactly one year since COVID vaccines became available in Arizona. On Dec. 14, 2021, Gov. Doug Ducey announced Arizona had received the first doses of COVID vaccines. The past year provided ample opportunities for research on the safety and efficacy of vaccinations. The AZDHS report shows an overwhelmingly positive impact the vaccines have on personal safety and lowering the need for hospital stays related to COVID infection.
“My top ask of the community at this time is for all who are eligible to get vaccinated and receive your boosters if you have not yet done so,” Bessel said. “This is the best way to prevent serious COVID illness that requires hospital-level care.”
Bessel said Banner is at a contingency level of care but could transition to crisis standards of care if hospitalizations continue to rise.
Contingency level of care means that hospitals are not operating normally. Bessel said Banner staffers have been doing less documentation and certain patients may have experienced prolonged wait times for non-essential healthcare visits. Healthcare staff is also being moved to different units they don’t normally work in to support the lack of health care workers. The national labor shortage hit the healthcare workforce hard this last year.
“We are experiencing the impact of this shortage in our hospitals, with many core team members who decided to retire, exit the healthcare industry, or transition to non-bedside roles because of prior surges and the enormous physical and mental impact the pandemic has had on them,” Bessel said.
Banner Health has hired 2,600 travel workers to support on-site staffing.
Crisis standards of care are determined by the State of Arizona and AZDHS has a procedural plan to provide healthcare institutions with guidance. According to AZDHS, crisis standards of care will only occur during the most extreme disasters that directly impact the healthcare system.
AZDHS guidelines say crisis standards of care will apply when most of the community’s infrastructure is in bad shape; local officials can’t perform their roles to assist the community; community functions are irregular, and there’s a major strain on regional resources.
Although Arizona healthcare systems have not hit this threshold, Bessel said it is possible. Banner Health estimates future hospital needs by forecasting surges in inpatient care and recent forecasts are not positive.
“If our continued forecast holds true, we will be in a position where we will be unable to meet the care needs of all of Arizonans,” Bessel said.
The current forecast from Banner Health says hospital needs will continue to increase until a peak in mid-January.
The estimate follows the timeline of seasonal holiday celebrations. Public health officials have been reluctant to tell people to avoid family gatherings during the holiday season, but they recommend wearing a mask indoors if family members are not vaccinated and to get vaccinated before congregating with family members.
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Monday, December 13, 2021
