Grand Canyon Times

In an interview this week on the "Morning Ritual" with Garret Lewis, a data analyst said that the number of COVID-19 cases in Arizona is coming down, the state is in a good position to reopen and the daily summary numbers reported by state health officials are "not informing the public."

Lewis said on the show that Pima County had a 6.99% positivity rate for the week and that the week before it was 7.3%, adding, "We're supposed to be 7% or below." He said that Arizona's cases are down to 75 per 100,000 people, and the week prior there were 148 cases per 100,000.

On Aug. 5, more than 700 Tucson prisoners tested positive for the coronavirus, and Lewis asked if these cases should even be counted.

Garret Lewis | https://knst.iheart.com/

"It's clear that if there is a large amount of testing done on all the prisoners, then you're going to find more positives and those are not reflective of the community spread," the data analyst, who was only identified by his Twitter handle of @Hold2LLC, replied. He and other analysts have created a website called Rational Ground that provides updated information on COVID-19 numbers throughout the U.S.

Lewis questioned what that number had to do with opening up gyms and restaurants. The analyst said that the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) should "keep them separate."

Lewis questioned the analyst about the number of revisions being made by the ADHS in its daily reports, and pointed out some examples such as Aug. 9 when 8,345 new tests were added; Aug. 2, when 556 were taken off, and the week before when 1,015 cases were removed from the numbers. He asked the analyst if they were duplicates.

"That's our best guess," the analyst said, adding that when the ADHS makes updates from the day before, "that is the delta . . . that doesn't mean those occurred in the last 24 hours."

The analyst said that out of 8,000 tests last week, there were "only 500 positives. The numbers "are going down. That is 5.99% positive for the state."

The analyst also pointed out one week when the ADHS removed 1,700 tests, saying, "I don't know why." He pointed to the possibility of the ADHS "de-duplicating" and, if so, he said they were de-duplicating a lot of tests.

He explained that de-duplicating is removing those cases wherein someone was tested several times and it was counted as more than one case. For example, if someone enters the hospital and tests positive, then during their hospital stay is tested again and comes out positive. Then, if the patient has no symptoms and is tested again, and comes out positive, that one person would have been counted as three positives.

Garret and the analyst discussed how earlier this summer Arizona's numbers "shot into the stratosphere . . . but we don't know where those cases came from, where or who."

The analyst questioned if it came from people being tested twice, or maybe people who were being tested in nursing homes weekly, or everyone being tested when entering a hospital.

The analyst also said the hospitals were never overrun.

"It's kind of odd that COVID could shoot up that high then shoot back low, but overall hospital capacity doesn't change," the analyst said.

For Arizona, the analyst said, "as of this weekend . . . the COVID inpatient and ICU [numbers] have dropped essentially all the way back to the baseline – where we were when reopening occurred and the lockdowns left us."