COVID-19 deaths in Yavapai County have quadrupled in the past two weeks. Whereas on July 7 there were just 11 confirmed deaths from the virus in the county, the total number hit 49 as of Tuesday, July 21.
Public health officials doubt that the increased mortality from the virus in the area is a result of a change in the character of the virus or infections in the area, but believe it is more likely a result of increased spread of the virus, especially to older populations.
“Partly, we’ve been lucky so far that we didn’t have many deaths,” Stephen Everett, section manager for communicable diseases at Yavapai County Community Health Services, said. “A good portion of the deaths that are being reported were in nursing homes. There’s a big chunk there. All the people that died were over 55, and about half of them were over 75, so it’s a lot of seniors, a lot of people with health issues. This is exactly what we expected to see.”
According to Everett, deaths in the county so far have been split roughly equally between the Verde Valley and Prescott sides of the mountains, though he was not able to provide specifics on how many deaths happened where.
As of Tuesday, there were a total of 459 confirmed cases in the Verde Valley, a 22.1% increase in the past week. Cottonwood has 185 cases, Sedona 78, Camp Verde 106, Cornville 23, Rimrock 24 and Clarkdale 42,
with one additional case elsewhere in the Verde Valley. Yavapai County has a total of 1,449 cases, a 20.7% increase in the past week. While cases are still increasing quickly, the virus does not seem to be spreading quite as fast as the last week in June and first week of July, when daily totals were frequently over 40% above the previous week.
“Nationwide and in this region, the mortality rate for COVID has been steady or slightly lower than it was in the previous round of the outbreak due to the advancements in some of the medications — remdesivir and corticosteroid use,” Dr. Leon Pontikes, chief medical officer at Verde Valley Medical Center, told reporters on a press call on July 15. “So we think that the increase in the number of deaths that we’re seeing — the overall, or what we call the gross number — is just because of the increased number of cases overall, and it does not reflect an increased mortality for every 100 cases.”
Everett said that for the county, the classification of a death as COVID-related is usually at the discretion of the doctor who fills out the death certificate, but that efforts are being made to not count deaths of COVID patients for reasons besides the virus. He pointed to one case where the county had been previously counting a death as COVID-caused, but an autopsy by a pathologist found that while the patient had contracted the disease, the virus had not been a main cause of death, and the death was de-counted by the county.
Contrary to some claims, hospital officials say that they are not simply classifying the death of any patient who tested positive for the virus as a COVID death even if it was caused by unrelated factors, though they are taking into account the effect a COVID condition can have on other parts of the body when determining cause of death.
“If it’s directly related to infection, then we are classifying it as a COVID death,” said John Mougin, chief quality officer and hospitalist medical director for Northern Arizona Healthcare. “There may be an occasional patient who comes in with a traumatic injury who happens to be COVID-positive, but doesn’t report any symptoms or any illness and it doesn’t contribute to their demise. Then we would call that a death from the trauma with COVID just being one of the other diagnoses on the list.”
“If you have COVID and the COVID causes you to have, for example, a stroke or heart attack, and you die of that stroke or heart attack — if you didn’t have COVID, potentially you wouldn’t have had the stroke, or the heart attack, or the blood clot,” Pontikes said. “So COVID is the cause of death with secondary complications of stroke or heart attack or blood clot …. So that would be classified as a COVID death.”
