Arizona hospitals appear to be past the worst of the surge

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Arizona may be getting a handle on its coronavirus surge. It is not a moment too soon, as hospitals in the Grand Canyon state have been close to overwhelmed for weeks.

By the end of June, over 100 patients were hospitalized for COVID-19 daily in Arizona. But new hospitalizations were under 40 every day last week. Tuesday saw only 22, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

“Our general ward and ICU hospitalizations have both peaked and appear to be declining,” said Dr. Joe Gerald, a program director at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.

The number of new cases also appears to be declining, but that data is, at present, unreliable.

The number of tests conducted in Arizona plateaued at about 110,000 tests per week, according to Gerald. “So we’re testing fewer people than might be expected,” he said.

Additionally, test results are substantially delayed.

“Our testing is a train wreck,” said Will Humble, executive director for the Arizona Public Health Association and former director at the Arizona Department of Health Services. Sonora Quest, the lab company that analyzes the tests in Arizona, has a backlog of over 61,000 tests, according to a local ABC affiliate. “They just don’t have the capacity to run these tests …there are 10 to 14 day turnaround times for most samples,” he said.

Intensive care unit bed utilization has also dropped in the last week but increased slightly on Wednesday.

“Even at the drop, the numbers are way too high,” warned Holly Ward, director of marketing and communications at the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association. “We still have a ways to go.”

ICU bed utilization remained at or close to 90% for most of July, but has hovered between 85%-87% over the last few days. Yet that may understate the extent to which hospitals are stretched thin.

“When it says, for example, 92%, it is actually closer to 97%,” said Humble. He claimed that the percentage of occupied ICU beds is based on the number of total licensed beds. However, not all of the licensed beds have sufficient hospital staff to attend to them. If actual staffed beds were used to calculate the percentage, the ICU occupancy rate would be higher.

Katherine Ellingson, a professor of epidemiology at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, also worries that the improving numbers don’t capture the burden put on hospital staff.

“Despite increasing ICU bed availability in the state as a whole, I’m still concerned with individual hospitals being overwhelmed and shortages in staffing to care for patients even when beds are available,” she said. “The chronic stress that this pandemic has placed on our healthcare workers has got to be acknowledged in tandem with the numbers.”

Many of the experts credited the decision by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey in mid-June to allow localities to implement mask requirements with the recent improvement.

Humble also said that Ducey’s decision in late June to close the bars and nightclubs was key.

“The governor recognized the nightclubs were completely out of control,” he said. “It was nuts. When the end of the stay-at-home order came on May 15, a lot of them were offering free champagne … young people wanted to get out, and they did. And you could see it in the data. The number of news cases for people in their 20s and 30s just skyrocketed.”

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