Starting in late November, the Verde Valley experienced an increase in new COVID cases, which public health leaders have attributed heavily to gatherings around the holidays — first Thanksgiving, then the Christmas and New Year’s break.
Whereas in the first week of November, the valley was averaging 14 new cases per day, by the first week of December that had risen to a 70 per day average. The first week of January rose all the way to 80 per day before peaking at 102 per day shortly afterward.
Early February has seen a sharp decline in the number of new COVID-19 cases in the Verde Valley, with just 34 cases per day in the first week, and falling all the way to five per day in the seven days leading up to Feb. 12.
Some caveats: With the low rate of new cases, Yavapai County Community Health Services, which is responsible for keeping track of new cases in the county, has been using the time to clean up previous errors in the data, which Public Information Officer Terri Farneti said are mostly due to duplicates from individuals who took tests twice in a short time frame, especially those who may have written their name differently on different tests.
“Whoever gave them the test named them differently,” Farneti said. “There’s been some cleaning at the state level and at the county level.”
Even with this skew in the data, the county has without a doubt seen a sharp decrease in the spread of the virus during this time, though it may be slightly smaller than it appears. The two-week test positivity rate has dropped to 14.8% as of Friday, Feb. 12, a sharp decline from a peak of over 30% in late December.
Verde Valley Medical Center, which usually had over 20 COVID patients at any given time during the height of the pandemic a month ago, had just nine COVID-positive patients as of Friday, Feb. 12.
“We are still averaging 45 to 50 new COVID-19 cases a day in Yavapai County,” Farneti said. “[This is] compared to 200 cases a day that we were seeing in January and December.”
Farneti said that YCCHS does not have a clear explanation of why cases are declining as fast as they are, though they believe that the previous spikes were caused by the holiday gatherings. With less than 20% of the county vaccinated, it remains unlikely that vaccinations are causing herd immunity and reducing the spread of the virus enough to cause the declines. The decline in new cases and hospitalizations mirrors a nation- wide decline happening over the past few weeks.
The drop in new cases comes at a time of other positive developments in the fight
against the virus. According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, the county has surpassed 37,000 individuals who have received at least one dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine as of Thursday, Feb. 11, with over 4,000 individuals who have received the second dose, giving them the full protection of the vaccine. With the county having a total of 16,956 cases of the virus since the beginning of the pandemic and over 1,000 vaccinations per day on average, the spread of the vaccine is far outpacing the spread of the virus, especially among older populations most vulnerable to the virus, who have been among the first to get vaccinated.
In the first two weeks of February, 15 individuals in the Verde Valley died of COVID-19.
“COVID-19 deaths usually show a surge up to four to six weeks after we initially see a surge in cases diagnosed in the region,” Verde Valley Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Leon Pontikes said. “This is because once a surge in cases occurs, the proportion of those patients, of course, get admitted to hospital as their condition worsens. As a patient’s condition worsens over time and complications set in, deaths often occur approximately a month [or more] after a patient is initially diagnosed with COVID-19.”
The decline in cases coupled with the spread of vaccinations makes it plausible that the worst of the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, though public health leaders stress that the virus remains dangerous, especially with the spread of more contagious strains that have been identified in the U.S. Public health officials stress the need to continue social distancing, strict hygiene regimens and mask wearing for the time being to prevent another spike before the pandemic is over.
“We don’t want people to be complacent about the drop in cases,” Farneti said. “It doesn’t make it any less contagious, and it doesn’t make the variants go away. We still need to be cognizant of the threat.”
