Dr. Joseph Varon enters the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at the United Memorial Medical Center on December 29, 2020 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Go Nakamura / Getty Images)
This is a regularly updated story with the latest information on coronavirus and its impact in Arizona and beyond on December 30, 2020.
PHOENIX – Arizona health officials reported 5,267 new cases of coronavirus and 78 additional deaths on Wednesday.
The state’s documented totals increased to 512,489 COVID-19 infections and 8,718 deaths, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services panel.
Several COVID-19 metrics in Arizona have been at or near pandemic levels.
The number of patients admitted to confirmed or suspected COVID-19 hospitals in Arizona rose to a record 4,526 on Tuesday, an increase of 97% since Thanksgiving.
The number of COVID-19 patients in the state’s ICU beds rose to 1,076 on Tuesday, the sixth consecutive day with a record.
The use of ventilators and visits to the emergency room by confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients also reached record levels on Tuesday.
Suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients across the state occupied 53% of all hospital beds and 61% of all ICU beds, both records.
In general, the hospitalization beds were 91% and the ICU beds were 90% full.
The rising tide of patients with COVID-19 is squeezing the space left for other patients in Arizona hospitals. Only 39% of all inpatients were not COVID on Tuesday, the second lowest rate in the pandemic. For ICU beds, 29% were non-COVID, the lowest rate recorded.
Arizona’s weekly positivity percentage for the COVID-19 diagnostic test, an indicator of how much the virus is spreading in the community, was 22% through 113,233 tests last week. If that holds true, it will break the record 21% in the week that started on June 28th.
The percentage of positivity is up to 27% through 15,433 tests this week.
Official positivity rates are based on when samples are collected, not when they are reported, so the percentage of the past few weeks may fluctuate as laboratories update tests and results are documented by the state.
The seven-day continuous average for newly reported cases from the health department was 5,715.29 on Tuesday, the lowest observed since December 7, according to tracking by The Associated Press.
The seven-day average of recently reported COVID-19 deaths increased to 73.57 on Tuesday, increasing for the second consecutive day after a five-day sequence of falls.
Daily state updates show case, death and test data after the state receives the statistics and confirms them, which can take several days or more. They do not represent actual activity in the past 24 hours.
Hospitalization data published every morning is reported electronically the night before by 100 hospitals across the state, as required by the executive order.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has no impact on some people and is severely debilitating or fatal for others. Infected people without symptoms – which include, but are not limited to, cough, fever and difficulty breathing – are able to spread the virus.
Information about the test locations can be found on the Arizona Department of Health Services website.
Below are Wednesday’s latest developments on the coronavirus pandemic across the state, country and world:
- Britain authorized an easy-to-handle coronavirus vaccine and decided to extend the time between doses to allow more people to get some level of protection faster as infections increased.
- Globally, there were about 82.11 million cases of COVID-19 and 1.79 million deaths as of Wednesday morning, according to research by Johns Hopkins University. The figures for the US are around 19.52 million cases and 338,000 deaths.