COVID-19 community levels: 6/2/2022
COVID-19 Community Levels is a tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest data.
According to the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels, Clark County is the first to be at medium level after months of low levels in our synod.
All of our synod’s remaining counties are low level: Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Washington, Yavapai, and Yuma.
At all levels including the low level, prevention steps include:
Stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines
Get tested if you have symptoms
At the medium level, if you are at high risk for severe illness, talk to your healthcare provider about whether you need to wear a mask and take other precautions.
At the high level, wear a mask indoors in public. Additional precautions may be needed for people at high risk for severe illness.
Levels can be low, medium, or high and are determined by looking at hospital beds being used, hospital admissions, and the total number of new COVID-19 cases in an area.
State of the virus
Update for May 26
The United States is averaging about 110,000 new cases each day, a roughly 30 percent increase over the last two weeks. Since many cases go uncounted in official reports, the true toll is higher than these figures show.
Daily case reports are four times as high as they were in early April, but still a fraction of the numbers seen in January, when the initial Omicron surge was at its worst.
Hospitalizations are also increasing, though they remain well below the peak levels seen during the winter. About 25,000 people are hospitalized with the virus nationwide, and about 11 percent of those patients are in intensive care units. In late January, more than 150,000 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 and more than 25,000 of them were in intensive care.
The most recent uptick emerged first in the Northeast, where conditions now appear to be stabilizing. Though still high, case rates have started to level off or decline in New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.
Puerto Rico is reporting new infections at the highest rate in the country, though case levels there have started to level off in recent days. The territory’s recent hospitalization rate is higher than the national average, but lower than that of some Northeastern states.
Infections and hospitalizations are increasing quickly across much of the South and Southwest. Average daily case reports have more than doubled in the past two weeks in Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia.
The United States recently surpassed one million total coronavirus deaths. New reported deaths remain at some of their lowest levels of the pandemic, with about 360 announced each day.