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Arizona Does Coronavirus like Pros
Amateurs talk cases, professionals talk logistics. The professionals are in charge in Arizona. Every state, and the Coronavirus Task Force, should take note and give their citizens the same level of information. Dr. Cara Christ, MD, is the Arizona Department of Health Services director. Watch how this works in its April 14, 2020, Arizona COVID-19 briefing.
First, Dr. Christ lays out the trends in cases. The first chart is from the Arizona coronavirus page, updated daily, giving us a snapshot of the current extent and geography of the disease.
The second and third slides give us the trends.
The hospital reporting on COVID-like illness, or what the feds are calling “influenza-like illness,” shows Arizona has been trending the right way for about two weeks now, even as our number of reported cases increase with testing.
Now we get to the professional stuff. Given the number of cases and the trends in hospital reporting, what is Arizona’s status on beds and ventilators?
You can see that, even though there has been an increase in cases reported, there has been essentially no change in the level of inpatient bed use. There has been, and remains, a large reserve of beds, forced by the government directed cancellation of “elective,” really non-emergency, surgeries. In Arizona, Dr. Christ.
Even in the case of ICU beds, with all their associated equipment and personnel, Arizona is in great shape. We never needed the Army Corps of Engineers to bring more rooms back into service. ICU use in Arizona has been steady for the past two weeks. That brings us to the hot button issue, driven nationally by willful ignorance of available data.
Dr. Christ made that the last chart of her update. We are not even scratching Arizona’s existing capability. Total use is sitting, rock steady, around 25 percent, including COVID-19 patients.
This steady, competent, professional message, conveyed in the accompanying brief, marks a change in tone from earlier panic button mashing. The earlier tone came from ignorance, at the state and county level, of what was ground truth in the hospitals. Apparently, hospitals were not required to report and, over two months past the first federal briefings and the China travel ban, the state had not bothered to get the facts straight.
On March 23, 2020, the day before Admiral Polowczyk stepped up to the White House press briefing microphone for the first time, Governor Ducey signed an executive order on enhanced surveillance,* compelling full reporting of relevant data. After the admiral from J-4 got the nation-wide logistics sorted out and told governors that he now had visibility on the ground truth in their states, the Arizona government went from “I need, I need”** to “we’re good, we’re good.” The whole April 14 briefing, with two weeks of good data, took on a calm, competent, forward-planning tone. Governor Ducey even announced the addition of a large capacity to test for antibodies, starting with health and emergency workers.
* Excerpt of Arizona governor’s executive order 2020-13
** From the April 3, 2020, Coronavirus Task Force briefing:
Published in GeneralQ Because a lot of governors are saying that they can’t get what they need and different states have more pressing urgency, obviously, depending on the caseload.
REAR ADMIRAL POLOWCZYK: So we marry up — we’re marrying up where CDC — where the demand for COVID is to what’s in the commercial system. We’re providing that to these — to the commercial system. And we are making allocations to those of most pressing need.
Thirteen days — we now have the data. We now can make informed decisions. And so all of the “I need, I need, I need,” I now know the volume that has been happening and needs to be happening.
cold stone analysis
update: Doug Ducey was the CEO of Cold Stone Creamery which is amazing. Who cares if it’s unhealthy, Cold Stone ice cream is the bomb.
The quality information on the state website on Covid19 has improved greatly over the past two weeks. It’s now one of the best I’ve seen.
Ducey and the team have done an excellent communication job.
I wonder how Arizona stacks up in relation to other states, like New York, for instance, regarding emergency preparedness. I’m thinking about FEMA’s guidelines re: backup and emergency supplies – like a stock of ventilators.
The history of emergency preparedness (EP) has historically begun in, and is led by, the fire service. And, for all our faults and our insane Glorious Leaders, California leads the way. Florida is on a par, due to hurricanes. I have always viewed Arizona to be very similar to California for fire, and by fiat, emergency preparedness. Never having been on any Arizona fires, I have nonetheless followed its fire season, and met plenty of her firefighters, because Arizona’s fire season starts well before California’s, and by the time we get going, Arizona is winding down.
Arizona hospitals were low on PPE and ventilators at the start but between supplies from the federal stockpile, efforts by the governor to get PPE from other sources, and the relatively low and slow growth in cases it is looking much better.
The big problem in the state right now is in Navajo Nation where cases are running 8x per capita higher than the Phoenix area.
alcoholics, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, poverty
Yeah, but they are going to get smacked around soon. The former Director (resigned last month) of Emergency Management has joined a local broadcast team. Wendy Smith-Reeve was very critical of the governor.
Arizona got badly hurt by the same climate alarmism and ecology insanity that filled forests with fuel. Paradise CA came a few years after the Yarnell Hill fire disaster that took 19 lives of firefighters.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/01/arizona-firefighters-disaster/2478537/
My partner in practice and I attended the 50th anniversary of the Los Angeles Loop fire after which we took care of the burns of the men caught in a blind canyon.
Perhaps the sun has something to do with the low rate in AZ and FL:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sunlight-destroys-coronavirus-very-quickly-new-government-tests-find-but-experts-say-pandemic-could-still-last-through-summer-200745675.html
As an AZ resident I’ve generally happy with the States policies and results.
I moved here after about 15 years of having a second home here. I am so happy I left California. My wife’s great grand daughter is 6th generation CA but we left.
The thing I don”t see on the data charts is the median breakdown of fatalities by age; see this chart from Minnesota (median 87 years)
Louis Brandeis: Sunlight is the best disinfectant
I think the most important factor is viral load and that is created by close proximity, as in mass transit. New York and Boston and Chicago are all examples I know. Los Angeles is the opposite with most commuters in private cars. San Francisco has BART but that is quite small compared to New York. I notice Japan is having a flare up after opening some of that society. They also have a big mass transit situation, plus an elderly population.
That was not part of the on-camera briefing, this last time, but is part of the dashboard on the website I linked in the OP.