Arizona Dept. of Health Services reduces frequency of COVID-19 updates from daily to weekly

'It's reasonable for you to stop wearing masks in indoor environments,' health expert says amid COVID-19 decline

PHOENIX (AP) - Arizona’s public health agency on Saturday provided its last planned daily update of the state’s coronavirus dashboard of pandemic data such as additional COVID-19 cases, new deaths and hospitalization levels.

The state Department of Health Services announced Feb. 18 that it would switch to weekly dashboard updates starting next Wednesday because the outbreak is slowing and to be consistent with other infectious disease that are reported.

"It also will provide a clearer view of COVID-19 trends by smoothing the variability in daily reporting by labs and other sources," the department’s announcement said.

In the dashboard’s final daily update released Saturday, virus-related inpatient hospitalizations dropped for the 29th straight day, falling to 1,313 as of Friday. That’s down from 3,559 on Jan. 27, which was the peak of the now-ebbing coronavirus infection wave associated with the omicron variant.

The additional 1,638 newly confirmed infection cases and 15 additional deaths reported by the dashboard on Saturday boosted the state’s pandemic totals to 1,976,890 infection cases and 27,946 deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University data, Arizona’s seven-day rolling average of new infection cases dropped from 5,239.6 on Feb. 9 to 1,944.7 on Wednesday while the rolling average of daily deaths rose from 60.9 to 68.3 over the same period.

"It’s different from what people have gotten used to with COVID data but not different from how we do it with other infectious disease data," said Jessica Rigler, Arizona Department of Health Services assistant director.

She added: "You are getting a more complete picture of what happened in that week instead of data just trickling in."

'It's reasonable for you to stop wearing masks in indoor environments'

Executive Director of the Arizona Public Health Association, Will Humble, says there's some good news on the horizon with the country transitioning from a pandemic to an endemic.

"Every new case is either a breakthrough case from a vaccinated person, omicron found all those people who didn't want to get vaccinated and that combined with the fact that omicron is less lethal than delta changes the way you should make decisions away from cases and moving toward hospitalizations," Humble said.

Humble says AZDHS will also be providing more data on hospitalizations, and those numbers are also going down. "As that percentage of people in the hospital with COVID begins to drop further and further, there's more room to keep up on those non-emergency procedures that have been delayed for so many months."

According to that same data, four counties in Arizona, Maricopa, Yavapai Coconino and Santa Cruz, are in the "moderate" range in terms of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. This means, he says, they could stop wearing masks in those areas, except for settings like assisted living, skilled nursing, or homeless shelters.

"It's reasonable for you to stop wearing masks in indoor environments. That could apply for example to K-12, universities, private businesses …" Humble said.

He says this latest guidance is a turning point in the right direction.

"You have this higher level of immunity, antibodies and t-cells everywhere in Arizona now and that's why you see new infections not resulting in new infections, generally. So, I think the new criteria, the new guidance is actually pretty good."