AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending March 30: New Wave or Anomaly?


 Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday, as well as the most recent update of Tempe wastewater surveillance:



The most concerning aspects of the table and first graph is a rather large uptick in cases at the state level. Could this be the start of a new wave? 

There is reason to worry because epidemiologists have warned that it is just a matter of time until the current wave in Europe makes its way over here. JP Weiland, a scientist who does modeling of disease spread, tweeted a graph predicting that the decline in cases would bottom out this week and be followed by another period of increasing cases.

I thought we were getting an early start on a new wave until I saw this tweet from Garret Archer, a data journalist who works for ABC 15. He was informed by AzDHS prior to this week's data dump that cases would go up due to a testing provider just now reporting some data that should have been reported in October. 

So it looks like this week's jump may be an anomaly after all. This is supported by the continued decrease in case numbers in Maricopa County and the continued low values for Tempe wastewater.

It's unfortunate that AzDHS didn't make a note of this on their dashboard, requiring us to get this information via word-of-tweet from Garret. It's also too bad they didn't tell us how many of the reported cases from this week are old ones from October.

Wastewater Saga

I had intended to incorporate the Tempe wastewater surveillance data in the table, along with Pima county data. As I reported last week, it was unclear when Tempe would update its dashboard. It has since done so, but the period ends on March 20. 

It appears the updates are coming every ten days and are ten days old at that point, meaning this data it won't fit into the table scheme. So I am including a separate chart with that data. I will update it whenever new data comes available. 

As for Pima County, I reported last week that their data had vanished from the CDC dashboard.  So I did some investigating. 

They are still doing the surveillance, but it appears that there is some snafu that is preventing this data from making its way to the CDC. Someone in the county's public health department said they would look into it. If the data get restored I will report it going forward too.

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