Arizona is a resounding success story! Just last week, Donald Trump verified that during a visit with Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. Cases are down. Hospitalizations are down. Even deaths are decreasing. Everything is looking good.
Or at least that’s what the data shows. At any time people are welcome to check the official information available at the Arizona Department of Health Services’ Data Dashboard. I’ve been checking it every day since the start of June when we first started noticing that numbers were on the increase. At the time, numbers were spiraling ever higher. The stay home order (it was never that strict as orders go) had been lifted on 5/15, and the Memorial Day weekend had seen huge crowds partying like it was 2019. And all of this coincided with large demonstrations for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The 7 day moving average of new cases per day for the 1st through the 7th were scary: 509, 638, 709, 713, 838, 885 and 993. That 7 day average hasn’t been below 1,000 since then, and it peaked at 3,697 on 7/7.
It was at the end of June that Ducey closed down bars again and reduced restaurant capacity such that tables had to be 6’ apart (effectively 50% capacity). He also allowed cities and counties to pass mask ordinances, and many did, including Maricopa County, the behemoth county that includes the Phoenix metro area. But there was significant resistance to following the rules. Gyms sued him for the right to open (they lost at first but recently won). Residents continue to go maskless in public, and our large contingent of political conservatives often actively flout the rules.
With so many people being so irresponsible it was inevitable that the numbers would simply continue to grow ever higher until something more drastic was done. The strange thing is nothing else was ever done, yet the numbers are coming down quite a bit.
One month ago, the 7 day average of daily cases was 3,576. Today that number is 1,147. That’s a reduction of 68%. Some of this is explained by much lower testing numbers.
There is anecdotal evidence that people were so frustrated by the state’s previous difficulties in testing, they just chose not to get tested. And it was bad. People with symptoms had to pre-register for tests only to find that they still had to wait in a line that lasted 8 hours in record heat (and record heat in Phoenix is well above 110). After that ordeal (some had to return the next day because the testing site closed for the day), there was still the process of waiting 2 weeks or more to get results. But while I see the possibility that this is an issue, I suspect that people who are sick won’t bypass testing if they feel certain they are positive, so that shouldn’t have impacted case counts much, if at all.
How about the hospitals? As the numbers were going up, many of us were frustrated by Ducey’s attitude that insinuated that as long as hospitals had room for patients, we were fully prepared. This suggests that having plenty of room for people to die should be the goal. Saving lives would be a side benefit but not relevant. Those numbers were skyrocketing as well. Inpatient COVID-19 cases were approaching 1,000 beds at the start of June and peaked at 3,517 on 7/13.
But just as the case counts had started coming down, so too did the number of people being hospitalized with coronavirus. Victory! Since that high on 7/13, the number of inpatient beds in use by COVID-19 patients has dropped to 1,575, a reduction of 55%. Awesome! So our hospitals are emptying out.
Except they aren't. On 7/13 the total inpatient count for all reasons stood at 6,721. That number has since dropped to 6,398. Let’s do some math. On 7/13, there were 3,204 patients in Arizona hospital inpatient beds who were there for reasons that were not COVID related. Today that number is 4,823. So while the COVID patient count has gone down 55%, the non-COVID count has gone up 51%.
How about ICU beds? The COVID ICU bed count peaked at 970 on 7/13 but has come down to 506 now, a reduction of 48%. The total ICU bed count on 7/13 was 1,498 and is 1,408 now. Doing that math again, the non-COVID ICU count has gone from 528 to 902, an increase of 71%.
I am not a health care professional. I am not a statistician, and these may just be cherry picked numbers that seem extreme to me but have perfectly logical explanations. I’d like to hear those explanations.
Frankly, I think the numbers are being doctored to make Ducey look good to Trump. Well, that OR Arizona has a mystery ailment invading the state alongside COVID-19, and nobody in state government cares about it either.
