COVID-19 Update January 19, 2023

The super transmissible COVID-19 variant XBB.1.5 has made it to Arizona and new data from AARP demonstrates that vaccination levels in nursing homes remain troublingly low.

The presence of XBB.1.5 in Arizona is still low, but throughout the pandemic surges related to certain variants have hit Arizona slower than other states, the Arizona Republic reports. But experts say that it isn’t inevitable that levels will skyrocket in tandem with the variant’s emergence.

From David Engelthaler of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (T-Gen):

Although we’ve been seeing it (XBB.1.5) here in Arizona since early December, it hasn’t taken off yet. It’s not one of our dominant strains. Here, it’s one of dozens of subvariants we seem to have in Arizona right now. The best we can do in my mind is work with the most vulnerable, those that are over 70 years of age, make sure their immunity is boosted, whether it’s from a recent infection or a recent booster shot. That’s just going to continue to prevent them from getting a serious outcome.

Unfortunately, seniors in nursing homes are not as protected as they could be. Modern Healthcare reports that AARP is raising alarms after finding that only 47% of nursing home residents and less than a quarter of nursing home staff are up-to-date on vaccines. Arizona lags behind every other state, too, with only 26% of residents fully up-to-date. Ari Houser, senior methods adviser for AARP’s Public Policy Institute points to a lack of initiative on the federal level to maintain boosters:

There was not an extraordinary effort to get nursing home residents vaccinated. There was a normal effort. And so, we have normal results.

As part of the effort to encourage seniors to get vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified safety signals related to medical concerns that might arise as a result of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. According to the CDC, the preliminary signal for investigation has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 bivalent vaccine.

The Washington Post reports that pregnant people infected with COVID-19 are seven times more likely to die of pregnancy complications than those not infected. Research from BMJ Global Health also shows that infants born to those with a COVID-19 infection during pregnancy also have a higher risk of severe outcomes.

Over the past week, there were 2,751 new cases of COVID-19 and 128 deaths associated with the coronavirus reported, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services COVID-19 data dashboard.