COVID-19 community levels: 1/19/2022
Note: our updates can be a week behind due to our news cycle overlapping with Thursday updates. View the latest CDC and NYTimes updates here.
COVID-19 Community Levels is a tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest data.
Apache is our synod’s sole medium level counties. The remaining are at low levels: Clark, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Nye, 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 January 13
Regional differences are increasingly driving the current state of the virus in the United States.
On the East Coast, cases and hospitalizations are rising notably — and, due to the area’s large population, these increases are enough to drive up national figures. The Carolinas are especially hard hit, with new cases nearly twice as high as they were a month ago.
In the West, however, many metrics are flat or falling. Several states, including South Dakotaand Wyoming, are currently near their all-time lows for reported cases and hospitalizations.
Deaths are rising, but data anomalies in recent reporting may have inflated these counts.
How to read Covid data now
Higher test positivity rates are a sign that many infections are not reported — even if they are tested for at home. This results in a more severe undercount of cases. The number of hospitalized patients with Covid is a more reliable measure because testing is more consistent in hospitals. Read more about the data.