One of every 284 Arizonans has died of Covid-19.

From Cronkite News/Arizona PBS’s article, On second anniversary, COVID-19 still racks up grim milestones in Arizona: In two years, Arizona “has racked up close to 1.8 million infections and the virus has killed almost 26,000, just two of many grim milestones on the pandemic’s “really long journey.” The rate of COVID-19 deaths in the state is currently second-highest in the nation, according to federal data.

COVID-19 deaths in the past week alone totaled 483, the highest weekly total since the start of the pandemic. Arizona’s COVID-19 death rate was 352 per 100,000 residents, second only to Mississippi’s 360 deaths per 100,000.”

All counties are at extremely high levels of risk for unvaccinated people. Extremely high risk counties for unvaccinated people in our synod include Apache, Clark, Cochise, Coconino, Gila, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pima, Pinal, Santa Cruz, Washington, Yavapai, and Yuma counties.

State of the virus

• New coronavirus cases continue to plummet nationwide. Hospitalizations are also declining.

• About 2,600 coronavirus deaths are being announced every day, the most since last winter. Death reports are up about 40 percent in the last two weeks.

• Connecticut is averaging fewer than 2,000 cases a day, down from more than 10,000 daily in early January. Florida is averaging fewer than 25,000 new cases a day, down from a mid-January peak of more than 60,000.

• About 130,000 patients with the virus are hospitalized nationwide. While hospitalizations have been declining significantly, they remain at one of the highest levels of the pandemic.

• Most of the country is seeing rapid improvement in case data. In Montana and North Dakota, among the last states to report a peak in Omicron cases, reports of new infections have started to fall.

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.”