COVID-19 Update: June 30, 2022

Three Arizona counties are reporting high community transmission levels of COVID-19 this week and despite the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendation that children between 6-months and 5-years-old receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Arizona parents have been slow to get their children vaccinated.

Across the state there was a total of 16,514 new cases since last week and 63 new deaths related to COVID-19. According to the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS), La Paz, Navajo and Apache counties are meeting thresholds to be considered “high” for COVID-19 community transition. The Department noted that despite the high number of cases, they are still fewer than the number of cases experienced during the most recent winter surge related to the Omicron subvariants BA.1 and BA.2.

As a result of increased community transmission levels, Northern Arizona Healthcare announced on Tuesday that it would escalate its visitation guidelines to restrict patient visitors to two per day, excluding COVID-positive patients who may only have one visitor per day per hour.

Dr. Andrew Carroll, an Arizona family practitioner, told Cronkite News that reception of the COVID-19 vaccine for the youngest eligible children has been tepid at best:

Demand is down, we aren’t seeing long lines or phones off the hook for this vaccination round.

Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association, said that a lot of family care providers and pediatricians are hesitant to deal with the paperwork involved in ordering the vaccine, which also requires that the provider’s office prove to ADHS that there is a freezer of the requisite parameters to hold keep the vaccine at a required temperature.

The CDC’s director Dr. Rochelle Wallensky released a statement in support of children and adolescents receiving the Moderna vaccine last Friday:

It is critical that we protect our children and teens from the complications of severe COVID-19 disease. Today, we have expanded the options available to families by recommending a second safe and effective vaccine for children ages 6 through 17 years. Vaccinating this age group can provide greater confidence to families that their children and adolescents participating in childcare, school, and other activities will have less risk for serious COVID-19 illness.

A new modeling study from the Imperial College London suggests that nearly 20 million lives were saved across the globe by the COVID-19 vaccine in their first year of use. According to Associated Press, researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate that the vaccines prevented 4.2 million deaths in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France, and 507,000 in the United Kingdom.

COVID-19 pandemic relief funding from the federal government helped to keep struggling hospitals in poor or rural areas from going under during the pandemic, but bolstered the robust margins of wealthier, more stable hospitals, according to the Washington Post. From North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell:

The rich got richer. It’s a transfer of wealth to them from the taxpayers.