President of the Arizona Public Health Association shares a COVID-19 update

Arizona passed New York in COVID-related deaths per capita. We talked about that and other, more encouraging COVID-issues with Will Humble, President of the Arizona Public Health Association.

“New York stayed at the top of the list for a long, long time. Now, Arizona has taken the lead, overtaken New York so now we’re about 4th or 5th in the country,” Humble said.

He continued that the souther states like Alabama and Louisiana are still the highest in COVID deaths along with New Jersey.

Humble said these numbers are related to the lack of mitigation efforts in the state, “the huge surge we had from December to January, we had basically no mitigation at all. No state-side face-covering mandate, little face covering at the local level, and most important I think of all… no mitigation of bars, restaurants and night clubs.”

He said that those were the environments that spread the virus so easily and amplified the cases greatly.

Accordinfg to Humble, these COVID-related deaths are almost always the un-vaccinated and a lot of the individuals are seniors.

But, “adults of all ages are vulnerable to having really bad outcomes,” Humble said.

He shared that the Winter will likely have high COVID numbers but not like the year prior.