AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending April 13: The Data are a Hot Mess!


Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday, and Pima/Yavapai counties and Tempe wastewater surveillance:





In the table, everything is in the right direction, except a slight increase in COVID-19 hospital beds. Cases are now at their lowest point since a year ago. Despite my worries last week, it seems there is not a new wave brewing in Arizona...yet.

Wastewater signals are, however, increasing in Pima and Yavapai counties—but decreasing in Tempe. Note that all the wastewater data are a week to ten days old. 

That's too bad because this is the only thing we have that can provide an early warning. Here is an excellent explainer from an epidemiologist (HT u/Soundvessel on Reddit) on why case rates are unreliable indicators now. Note especially the first graph showing a huge disconnect in the UK between current case counts and cases detected in random sampling (something I've noted before) that started in January.  

What a Mess

All that said, it's getting harder to know what data is reliable and who to believe. For instance, the other night NBC News claimed (HT u/Soundvessel on Reddit) that cases in Arizona are up 75%—from when/what, they didn't say. AzDHS data say cases are down 7.7% from last week. On the other hand Sonora Quest is reporting an increase in test positivity. So what are we supposed to make of this?

Then there are hospital beds. If you look at the relevant AzDHS dashboard section, it shows that the rate fell to zero two weeks ago and has stayed there. That seems pretty implausible.

Thus I have switched to healthcare.gov as a source of hospital beds data (HT @Jamal_James on Twitter). They say the current rate is around 2%, up slightly from a week ago. But their numbers do not align with previous AzDHS figures, which have contained higher rates.

Will Humble tells me "The ADHS dashboard data are now crap. Useless." He recommends using the numbers from the CDC Covid Data Tracker. But I believe the CDC gets most of its data from the state, and anyway the CDC site has its own problems!

For instance, they currently say Arizona has 61.2% of its population fully vaccinated. The figure in the table above is the number fully vaccinated from the AzDHS site divided by the state population, and it is 3% lower. JHU lists the value for Arizona as 70.39%, but that is about the percentage AzDHS lists as having any shot, not fully vaccinated (I've tried to get JHU to fix this, with no luck).

Then there is the wastewater data on the CDC site. As noted in previous weekly summaries, the data for Pima County disappeared then reappeared, while the Mohave and La Paz data remained. Well, now it's all gone—no data for Arizona at all.  

For that reason I have replaced the previous Pima County wastewater charts that I produced from CDC data with ones from Biobot Analytics (HT u/Soundvessel on Reddit). They give results from Yavapai County too, which the CDC never listed.

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