The goal since the pandemic started last March has been to keep hospitals from reaching capacity, but weâre past that now: Pima Countyâs hospitals are full and COVID-19 case counts keep reaching record highs.
âWeâve been talking about when the time would come when we are overwhelmed,â said Dr. Shannon Thorn, a Tucson infectious-disease specialist, âand we have reached that time.â
Thorn, who provides help at several local hospitals, said the number of available staffed hospital beds fluctuates depending on patients being discharged, transferred or dying.
On Wednesday night, one ICU bed became open. It filled immediately.
ANTHONY J. WALLACE
Cronkite News
PHOENIXÂ â Research from Arizona and beyond suggests the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can spread erratically, making some infected people âsuperspreadersâ and others dead ends for transmission.
This can create clusters or âmicro-hotspotsâ â neighborhoods, schools, towns or other small geographic areas where the virus runs rampant â even while communities next door remain relatively unscathed. These concentrated outbreaks arenât included in the Arizona Department of Health Serviceâs COVID-19 data dashboard, which breaks down cases by county.
Dr. Peter Plantes, an internal medicine specialist, works with hc1, a health care data analysis company that recently launched a COVID-19 dashboard explaining the dynamics of the pandemic in new detail.
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