Covid-19 exposure risk: 12/23/2021

Continued struggles with the Delta variant and the emergence of the highly infectious Omicron variant have pushed the country’s daily case totals to their highest levels since late summer.

All but two counties in our synod continue to have extremely high levels of risk for unvaccinated people.

• Extremely high risk counties for unvaccinated people in our synod include Apache, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Washington, Yavapai, and Yuma counties.

• Very high risk counties include Clark and Greenlee.

State of the virus

• Continued struggles with the Delta variant and the emergence of the highly infectious Omicron variant have pushed the country’s daily case totals to their highest levels since late summer.

• Caseloads are growing rapidly in the Northeast, where Omicron already has a foothold. Reports of new cases in New Yorkshot up more than 80 percent over two weeks. In Washington, D.C., more than three times as many infections are being identified each day now than at the start of December.

• Vaccinated people without booster shots are believed to be vulnerable to infection by Omicron. Though there have been some hopeful reports from South Africa, the severity of disease caused by the new variant remains unclear.

• Hospitalization rates remain very high in much of the Midwest and New England. A doctor in Michigan, a state with one of the highest hospitalization rates, described “living in a constant crisis.”

• In Florida, new case reports remain well below peak levels but are rising sharply. The state is averaging about 5,000 cases a day, up from around 1,300 at the start of the month.

The New York Times published county-specific guidance for common activities to help you lower your personal risk of getting Covid-19 and to help you protect your community. This advice was developed with public health experts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies.

“Providing transparent, real time information about what people’s risks are is empowering,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, who is a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the president and C.E.O. of Resolve to Save Lives. “You want to know how hard it’s raining Covid.”