Thursday, February 18, 2021
With an already strained vaccine supply, Pima County is seeing delayed COVID-19 vaccine appointments as shipments of doses are slowed due to harsh winter weather conditions across the U.S.
The county says the appointments at risk of being delayed include some second dose vaccine appointments at Tucson Medical Center beginning Feb. 18, as well as appointments at Tucson Convention Center and Banner South beginning Feb. 19.
Two mobile vaccination events set for Feb. 20 have been postponed. The mobile vaccination efforts are targeted to vulnerable populations and will now be held sometime in March, the county announced in a press release.
Further complicating vaccine administration, next week, the county will only receive 12,500 doses for all county-run vaccination sites.
This represents the lowest total of weekly doses allocated to Pima County in 10 weeks, according to the press release.
Last week, Pima County's vaccine supply was decreased to 17,850—a 40% reduction from the previous week. This week, the doses were cut down to 16,300 doses of Moderna, while the new University of Arizona POD was given 1,000 doses.
The state is now taking control of all Pfizer allocations, but the county has no insight into what the Pfizer allotment is.
The University of Arizona began operations Thursday as a state-run POD, or point of distribution, after it served as a county-wide vaccination center since mid-January.
The state plans to eventually transition the site to operate 24/7 and distribute up to 6,000 vaccines a day.
The UA is the third state-run site in Arizona after the State Farm Stadium in Glendale opened on Jan. 11 and the Phoenix Municipal Stadium opened on Feb. 1. It’s the first site to include a walk-up vaccination option in addition to a drive-through site.
The drive-through location is on the University of Arizona Mall and the walk-up site is at the Ina E. Gittings Building.
Adults 65 and over, education and childcare workers and protective service workers are currently eligible to receive the vaccine at the POD through appointments only.
Nearly 12,000 appointments through February have been booked, however.
Currently, the UA POD is administering Pfizer vaccines, as it has the proper cold-chain storage the brand requires.
Folk musician David Huckfelt has gathered several notable names from the Tucson music scene to celebrate the release of his new album “Room Enough, Time Enough.” On Saturday, Feb. 20, at 6 p.m., Huckfelt will be joined for a “songwriter circle” by XIXA frontman Gabriel Sullivan, blues singer Billy Sedlmayr and Giant Sand founder Howe Gelb — all of whom perform on Huckfelt’s new album.
“I think about records geographically, and what a special jewel Tucson is artistically speaking,” Huckfelt said of his new album. “There’s so many people I wanted to include. We kept building the table a little bit longer and the tent a little bit wider with each step of this record. It did snowball a little bit, but there was always this idea to have an outlandish posse of people on this record.”
The socially distanced outdoor show has a limited capacity with masks required, and tickets are selling fast. However, you can also view the show from home with a free Youtube live stream.
Purchase tickets here, and tune in for the live-stream here.
In addition, Huckfelt will perform with folk singer Charlie Parr at Monterey Court next Wednesday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m.
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry is asking the Pima County Board of Supervisors to suspend county-sponsored COVID-19 testing after notification that the state will not reimburse the county for most of its testing costs.
At a special board meeting Friday, Huckelberry said he'll ask the board to halt free coronavirus testing as of Feb. 22 to avoid incurring further deficit costs.
In a memo to the board, Huckelberry said the county reported to the state that $47.75 million was spent on PCR COVID-19 testing since April, with more than $10.68 million coming from county funds.
State officials said they could reimburse Pima County for only $1 million, according to an email from Eugene Livar, the chief of the epidemiology and disease control bureau at the Arizona Department of Health Services.
When the state submits its budget for federal approval in mid-March, Livar said ADHS can “reassess the funding available to support Pima County's testing needs,” but they likely won’t be able to “support the entirety of the $40,274,448 need but will likely be able to provide some level of support.”
While initially running the county’s testing operations under the assumption they would be partially covered by the $416 million provided to Arizona for testing through the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act, Huckelberry wrote in the memo that the federal funds are “being used by the State for other purposes,” adding, “It appears the uses for which the State will be using these funds is for everything but COVID-19 testing.”
Pima County currently has several sites offering free COVID-19 testing through partnerships with Arizona State University, the City of Tucson, Accu Reference Labs and Paradigm Labs.
If the Board of Supervisors approves the motion Friday, the free testing will cease across the county.
“This is unfortunate as it was abundantly clear to Pima County that the State allocation was for COVID-19 testing,” Huckelberry wrote in the memo. “At least that was the impression we were left with in reviewing the Federal 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act.”
PHOENIX – A team led by University of Arizona astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar found to date. Researchers hope the quasar, which is more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, will provide answers to how galaxies formed after the big bang.
“It was a relief to find,” said Feige Wang, lead author of the quasar’s research paper and Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We have been searching for this quasar for almost five years. We knew it was there somewhere.”
To find quasars, team members select celestial objects they believe may be quasars based on data from various imaging surveys. Capturing light spectrum data through a powerful telescope, they analyze it to determine whether the object is a quasar. This new quasar – J0313-1806 – was spotted with the Magellan Baade telescope in Chile in November.
“On that night of the discovery, the (quasar) was one of the last objects that we were going to be able to observe for a while because we couldn’t use the observatory again for another few months,” recalled Xiaohui Fan, co-author of the paper and associate head of the UA department of astronomy. “We didn’t want to miss the chance of observing it because it might be interesting. And, of course, that turned out to be true.”
Fan said the astronomers left the observatory and celebrated with a drink.
The researchers presented their findings at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in mid-January and submitted their research paper for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
With 1,143 new cases reported today, the total number of Arizona’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases topped 802,000 as of Thursday, Feb. 18, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Pima County, which reported 181 new cases today, has seen 107,582 of the state’s 802,198 confirmed cases.
With 213 new deaths reported today, a total of 15,276 Arizonans have died after contracting COVID-19, including 2,119 deaths in Pima County, according to the Feb. 18 report.
The number of hospitalized COVID cases statewide has declined in recent weeks, with 1,823 coronavirus patients in the hospital as of Feb. 17. That’s fewer than half the number hospitalized at the peak of the winter surge, which reached 5,082 on Jan. 11. The summer peak was 3,517, which was set on July 13, 2020. The subsequent lowest number of hospitalized COVID patients was 468, set on Sept. 27, 2020.
A total of 1,272 people visited emergency rooms on Feb. 17 with COVID symptoms, down from the record high of 2,341 set on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2020. That number had peaked during the summer wave at 2,008 on July 7, 2020; it hit a subsequent low of 653 on Sept. 28, 2020.
Editor's note: A earlier version of this story misstated the number of SNAP-eligible people who actually received the benefit in 2017. A Census Bureau report said that about one SNAP-eligible recipient in six did not get the benefit that year.
WASHINGTON – The number of food stamp recipients in Arizona has surged over the past year, but advocates worry that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is still only reaching a portion of those eligible for assistance.
A recent Census Bureau report found that one in six people who were eligible for SNAP in 2017 did not actually get the benefits. The participation was even lower in Arizona, where the bureau said that in 2018 almost 30% of SNAP-eligible people did not receive the benefit.
While the number of Arizonans getting SNAP benefits has spiked in the past year, advocates attribute that more to rising demand during the pandemic than to any narrowing of the gap between those deserving and those getting help.
“Some of the folks we are seeing enroll now are people who have been affected by the COVID pandemic, who have not had to take advantage of some of these programs in the past and are now engaging because they need that assistance to feed their families,” said Cynthia Zwick, executive director of Wildfire AZ, an anti-poverty organization.
Zwick and others fear that the same problems that kept eligible people from getting food stamps before may be challenging the COVID-19 newcomers to the system: confusing and burdensome paperwork, the stigma some feel and just a lack of knowledge about the program.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Working directly with the State Department of Health, bypassing Pima County Health officials, the UA plans to open a state vaccine Point of Distribution (POD) on the UA mall. This will be detrimental to the county efforts to get vaccines into the arms of the most vulnerable in our community.
Since the pandemic began, UA leadership’s efforts to be ground zero for all-things-COVID have negatively impacted the surrounding community. They refused to mandate testing for off-campus students, falsely claiming a constitutional ban. The City and County funded the work. The UA invited students back into the region while the pandemic was surging. The result was the UA ZIP code becoming the countywide COVID hot spot. Now comes the UA sidestepping the regional health care authority and dealing directly with Gov. Ducey, establishing a campus vaccination POD. Vaccination doses going to the state POD will count against the county’s allotment.
This week the state has reduced the Pima County vaccine allotment by 40%. What the state takes for the UA POD, decreases the amount the county has to administer at other sites. A recent mobile vaccination site led by Pima County Health was conducted with the intent of addressing the disparity that exists in vaccine distribution. At that site, 72% of the vaccines given went to Hispanic residents. Hispanics constitute only 3.7% of people vaccinated at state-run POD’s.
The Pima County Health Department is the health authority for this region. The UA’s newest effort to gain attention, by becoming the local 24/7 state-run POD, will have a negative impact on the county efforts to vaccinate a diverse population. Including those unable to navigate the new state operated registration system. The vaccine supply is controlled by the state. The UA must not exploit its relationship as an arm of the state by effectively "skimming doses off the top" while the county continues operating in a position where demand is significantly outstripping its state allocation.
Steve Kozachik represents Ward 6 on the Tucson City Council.
