AZ Pandemic Numbers for the Week Ending October 23—Not Good News

 

I've been having challenges with the weekly summary for the last couple of weeks. Last week, the AzDHS COVID-19 dashboard, where all the Arizona data ultimately originates, was down for scheduled maintenance. This prevented me getting any meaningful numbers, so there was no update.

This week something has gone wrong with the ASU dashboard where I get most of the numbers. I use it because they scrape numbers from the state site but provide historical data and running averages, which are the right numbers to use. 

However for some reason, ASU is not updating daily right now. The latest Maricopa County data is from Friday, not yesterday. I had to get yesterday's case numbers from the state site.

Another change is that the state is no longer reporting the total number of tests, so there is no way to calculate positive test percentage. That row has been eliminated from the table. 

 As we learned not too long ago, maybe this wasn't the best metric anyway. Nonetheless you have to be suspicious when a government entity reduces the amount of information it makes available. Are they trying to hide something?

All that said, here are the Arizona pandemic numbers for the week just ended:

I'm showing change from two weeks earlier, rather than one week earlier like usual, because of said outage. The state case numbers are up slightly. 

As already noted the Maricopa county numbers are from Friday rather than yesterday. Nonetheless the increase over two weeks is not an anomaly. The rate has been definitely been trending up over the last week. 

It is not good news that cases in the state's largest county are going in the wrong direction! Thankfully, hospital beds continue to decline.

That outage last week screwed up the curve for the new cases moving average. That's because instead of reporting the actual numbers for the 16th and 17th when the site came back up, AzDHS lumped three days-worth of data and reported a huge number of new cases on the 18th. 

That anomaly pulled the trend line on the ASU chart upward. I tried to straighten this out by imputing the values for the 16th, 17th, and 18th—setting the value for each of those days to the 18th total divided by three. Here is the resulting chart:

It is still showing a slight downward trend since the end of September, which makes sense given behavior of previous surges. We shall see if it keeps up. 

That said, it's disappointing that we're not down to 1000 cases per day. We should be given the way previous surges have ended. So there is another reason for concern.

Unsurprisingly, the accelerometer shows we've once again made virtually no progress on percent fully vaccinated:

Since I am getting vaccinated data from Johns Hopkins, I was able to get values for last week and included them in this chart. It was an abysmal (0.1% increase).  This week bounced back a little, but we are obviously stalled with zero acceleration, and have been for three months.

For two of those three months, Dr. Richard Carmona has been Ducey's vaccination czar. He is getting paid $400/hr to get more shots in arms, which he is clearly not doing. 

I'd really like to know how much we've paid this guy and what actual efforts he has made. If he has been billing 8 hour days for two months it could be as much as $128,000. That's a lot of dinero to achieve zero movement in the accelerator.