A document prepared for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, but not publicized, suggests more than a dozen states should revert to more stringent protective measures, limiting social gatherings to 10 people or fewer, closing bars and gyms and asking residents to wear masks at all times.
The Center for Public Integrity Reports, EXCLUSIVE: WHITE HOUSE DOCUMENT SHOWS 18 STATES IN CORONAVIRUS “RED ZONE”:
The document, dated July 14 and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, says 18 states are in the “red zone” for COVID-19 cases, meaning they had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population last week. Eleven states are in the “red zone” for test positivity, meaning more than 10 percent of diagnostic test results came back positive.
It includes county-level data and reflects the insistence of the Trump administration that states and counties should take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. The document has been shared within the federal government but does not appear to be posted publicly.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said he thought the information and recommendations were mostly good.
“The fact that it’s not public makes no sense to me,” Jha said Thursday. “Why are we hiding this information from the American people? This should be published and updated every day.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, a leader of the task force, referenced an earlier version of what appears to be the same report — which she said was updated weekly and sent to governors — in a press conference July 8 in which Vice President Mike Pence urged local leaders to open schools in the fall. She said Arizona, California, Florida and Texas were among the states the task force was monitoring carefully and that “a series of other states” were also in the red zone and should consider limiting gatherings.
“It’s clear some states are not following the task force’s advice” (which includes Arizona).
The 18 states that are included in the red zone for cases in the document are: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
The 11 states that are in the red zone for test positivity are Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas and Washington.
In May, the World Health Organization recommended that governments make sure test positivity rates were at 5 percent or lower for 14 days before reopening. A COVID-19 tracker from Johns Hopkins University shows that 33 states were above that recommended positivity as of July 16.
Arizona is worst in the nation at 22.81%.
“If the test positivity rate is above 10 percent, that means we’re not doing a good job mitigating the outbreak,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, science communication lead at the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer organization launched by journalists from The Atlantic. “Ideally we want the test positivity rate to be below 3 percent, because that shows that we’re suppressing COVID-19.”
Arizona is more than double the “not doing good” positivity rate at 22.81%. This is more than seven times over the 3 percent positivity rate for suppression of COVID-19. How in God’s name has Governor Ducey not ordered a statewide stay-at-home order, shutdown businesses, and issued a mandatory mask regulation?
The Daily Beast reports today, ‘A Sinking Ship’: Arizona Docs Say Ducey Steered State Into COVID-19 Surge:
Dr. Matt Heinz, a hospital physician in Tucson, Arizona, [who is also running for Pima county Supervisor in District 2] remembers the day he knew a coronavirus surge was coming. Or really, it was two days: a night shift that stretched from the evening of June 3 into the early hours of June 4, when Heinz admitted four patients suspected of having COVID-19, instead of the usual one or zero. It was a little over two weeks after Gov. Doug Ducey allowed the state’s lockdown order to expire, Heinz said, and “it was like someone flipped a switch.”
“And someone did flip a switch,” said Heinz, a former Democratic state representative who also served in the Department of Health and Human Services. “It was the governor.”
As cases in Arizona skyrocket, physicians told The Daily Beast they feel increasingly abandoned by Ducey, who was one of the first leaders in the country to lift lockdown restrictions this spring. Despite the state’s record-setting spike in cases—and the urging of hundreds of health-care workers and multiple mayors—Ducey so far has refused to re-institute a lockdown order or issue a mask mandate, leaving doctors and nurses feeling helpless.
“You can’t bluff this virus,” said Quinn Snyder, an emergency physician in Mesa. “People keep trying to find shortcuts around the issues at hand, but the virus just doesn’t care about those kinds of shortcuts. It will win.”
“I have been trying to talk to people and speak up as much as possible,” he added. “And it feels like we are on a sinking ship.”
A spokesperson for the governor said Ducey had taken a number of steps to slow the spread of the virus, including prohibiting large gatherings and pausing the operations of gyms, bars, nightclubs, waterparks, and tubing establishments. He also noted that Ducey had allowed cities to pass their own mask ordinances and that nearly 90 percent of the state was now under a local mask mandate.
“We want everyone to wear a mask in public,” the spokesperson said. “Our approach has been focused on bringing about the maximum mask compliance possible.”
Arizona reported more than 3,200 new cases in a single day Thursday, putting it behind only Florida in the number of new cases per capita. The figures were actually a slight decrease from previous highs, but the situation in the hospitals still looked dire—the number of ICU beds and ventilators in use by suspected or confirmed coronavirus patients hit new records Sunday. On Thursday, 90 percent of the state’s ICU beds were taken and 53 percent of its ventilators were in use, according to state Health Department data.
Inside the hospitals, doctors told The Daily Beast they were working more than 100 hours a week, and “countless” nurses were out sick. At one Tucson-area hospital, a secondary ICU that closed when things leveled off over the spring recently reopened, and the post-anesthesia care unit was “cannibalized” to house coronavirus patients, according to emergency physician Larry DeLuca. Snyder said one of the hospitals where he works had started housing adult patients in its pediatric towers, and the emergency department was also shuffling beds to make room for COVID-positive patients.
Several of the half-dozen doctors who spoke to The Daily Beast characterized these next few weeks as a “tipping point” for Arizona, where things could go from under control to completely out of their hands.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s any end in sight,” DeLuca said. “But not necessarily because of the rhythm of the disease, but because of our government’s response to it.”
One ICU physician in Tucson, who asked not to be named for fear of employer retaliation, said the official numbers actually underplayed the severity of the crisis. When hospitals reported that 90 percent of their ICU beds and half of their ventilators were in use, the physician said, those numbers included the extra beds and machines they’d brought in for the pandemic. If those percentages ever reached 100, there would be no feasible way for the hospital to scale up.
“If you were going by our pre-COVID capacity, we would be actually operating at 120 percent of capacity,” the physician said, adding that the hospital where they work had run out of its own ventilator supply and was now using those supplied by FEMA.
Several hospitals have already launched part or all of their emergency plans, including calling in refrigerated trucks to use as morgues. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office also recently announced it is preparing for an increase in corpses, saying the office is “currently near capacity for body storage.” (It added that while this situation is common for this time of year, it is “further complicated by the current pandemic.”)
For many, the announcement called to mind the images of bodies being loaded into trucks by forklift during the height of the East Coast outbreak in March, or the weeks-long wait for funerals. But there is one key difference: While New York shut down all non-essential businesses and issued a mask mandate during the height of its surge, Arizona is still allowing haircuts, spa days, and indoor dining.
At a press conference earlier this month, on the same day the number of cases passed 112,000, Ducey acknowledged that his earlier shutdown order—one that mirrored many of New York’s restrictions—had worked. The number of new cases in the state stayed relatively stable from the time the order went out in March to the day it expired in mid-May. Cases began to skyrocket in June, shortly after the reopening.
But Ducey has refused to issue another lockdown order. Instead, at the press conference, he claimed that his June 29 order shuttering all gyms and bars—but allowing restaurants, barbershops, hair and nail salons to stay open—had achieved “some results.” And he decreased indoor dining allowances by only 50 percent, which public health officials said was totally inadequate. (A spokesperson for Ducey’s office said the 50 percent reduction in restaurant capacity was part of recommendations made by the White House Coronavirus Task Force.)
Dr. Heinz described watching the governor’s press conference in shock. “We all think, ‘Finally, thank God, the deaths are all starting to go up … He’s going to take this seriously,’” he recalled. “And he announces some ridiculous non-measure.”
“We should have a stay-at-home order for at least 30 days, and that should have been re-initiated for all of June,” Dr. Heinz added. “We’re halfway through July.”
Ducey has also refused to issue a statewide mask mandate, despite the urging of more than 900 medical providers and five mayors, and only recently allowed cities to issue their own such ordinances. Earlier this month, photos of the governor going maskless to a June 6 graduation party sparked an uproar in the medical community. “That’s the guy in charge, so you know we’re in trouble,” Dr. Heinz said.
The Ducey spokesperson noted that the photo was originally claimed to have been taken a month later than it actually was, and called it a “smear-tactic meant to deceive and mislead.”
Meanwhile, hospitals in the state appear to be gearing up for a long fight. The Arizona Department of Health Services recently announced a partnership with Vizient, Inc. to bring in nearly 600 critical care nurses, in addition to those the National Disaster Medical System sent last month. Banner Health, the largest health-care system in the state, also posted an ad this month looking for out-of-state doctors, saying Arizona was “running low on ICU and hospitalist trained physicians.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson said Banner Health had brought in nearly 750 travel nurses and other specialists over the course of the pandemic and were expecting 200 to 400 more to come soon. The spokesperson said they had also “upskilled” more than 700 team members, meaning they had trained providers from another area of the hospital to work in respiratory units.
Andrew Carroll, a family medicine doctor in Chandler, is one of those “upskilled” providers. Banner asked him months ago to get his emergency medicine privileges in case of a surge, he said, and officially called him in a few weeks ago. His first stint in the emergency room will consist of three straight shifts next weekend.
Carroll said he was happy to help out, especially after hearing from so many emergency medicine colleagues who were already burned out. But he was also frustrated that it had come to this point.
“I’m angry that people still refuse to wear masks,” he said. “I’m angry that our government hasn’t made more mandatory public health policies.”
If the government had enacted those policies, he added, “I would not have to be dragged into the hospital to work three straight 12-hour shifts through the weekend, and come home and jump in the swimming pool before I see my family so they don’t get sick.”
“I’m willing, I’m ready, but I’m angry,” he said.
If everyone in the U.S. wore a mask, the coronavirus pandemic could be “under control” within four to eight weeks, Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield said in a discussion led by medical journal JAMA on Tuesday.
But Arizona is the most resistant state in the country when it comes to wearing masks, according to a recent study by Survival At Home, a survival and preparedness website, examining anti-mask activity online.
It is largely the right-wing cultists of the Party of Trump and QAnon who object to wearing a mask and put everyone at risk.
“I have 17 pre-COVID scientific, peer-reviewed studies/references that detail the health risks of prolonged wearing of face masks,” Republican State Rep. Kelly Townsend said in a tweet May 19. “Therefore, I will not be wearing one today. Mask-wearers should have nothing to worry about, if they work. ‘#MyBodyMyChoice’ #FetusBodyFetusChoice.”
Another local politician, Scottsdale Councilperson Guy Phillips received national attention when he ripped off his face mask and yelled into the microphone, “I can’t breathe” at a protest against Scottsdale’s mask mandate June 24.
And at a rally for President Donald Trump at Dream City Church in Phoenix June 23 a volunteer for the event, April Armen Dariz ,said “I don’t think it’s a right for others to make you wear one because I don’t live in a communist country.” She added that wearing a mask makes her “feel sick.”
It is often said about leadership, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” It is past time for Governor Ducey to get out of the way. Arizonans are needlessly dying because of his unwillingness to lead. His utter incompetence is criminal negligence.
This is why we’re still a dangerous mess. He listens to her
https://twitter.com/LOLGOP/status/1284551141469163524?s=20
Remember, she dutifully sat there while he told everyone to drink bleach. She’s complicit in the shit show of horrors
Hold these individuals accountable we must. No softball ing this is a time for pounding on the table. Legit Anger is part of the healing process and the rest comes later eg accountability punishment and if possible forgiveness. But never ever forget.