AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending August 17: Trouble Brewing in Tempe?

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday:



This week's numbers don't look quite as good as last week. Case numbers continue to decline. Again, case numbers are considered unreliable because of changes in testing, but at least they are going down. They are at about the same level as they were in May.

Deaths are up considerably, but as noted last week those figures have some hellacious delay built into them, and reflect what was going on like a couple of months ago. Hospital beds are up slightly. It's not clear why they should be, given that case numbers are going down.

Wastewater measures look good except Tempe. Its average almost tripled over a week and came close to hitting the 2022 record. 

The interesting thing is that if you look at the areas with the highest levels, they are all in tend to be North Tempe. One in particular, area 6, had a massive increase. That area straddles Apache between Rural and McClintock, and is primarily student housing. It went from 189K copies per liter on July 31 to  5.9M copies per liter on August 7, more than a 30x increase. 

I don't know what could explain this other than students returning for the fall semester, and they would have only started returning by August 7. If that's the right explanation then ASU can likely expect a lot of cases in the student body as the semester starts.

Posts from Earlier This Week You May Have Missed


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