January 6, 2021

Arizona Now Has the Highest COVID Infection Rate in the Entire World

Meanwhile, Gov. Doug Ducey continues to do nothing.

Customers cheer as Debbie Thompson, owner of the Horseshoe Cafe, informs them that she is violating the state's stay-at-home order by allowing guest dining at her restaurant in Wickenburg, Arizona, in May.Matt York/AP

The coronavirus is a rapidly developing news story, so some of the content in this article might be out of date. Check out our most recent coverage of the coronavirus crisis, and subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.

After months of mishandling its COVID-19 response, Arizona has reached a new low: The state now has the highest infection rate of anywhere in the world, according to new data released this week. Over the past seven days, the state has seen a daily average of 118.3 new cases per 100,000 residents, well above countries like the Czech Republic (99.4) and the United Kingdom (86). 

But if you drive around many parts of the state, you wouldn’t know that it leads the world in infections. That’s because Gov. Doug Ducey and municipal leaders think it’s perfectly fine to just keep doing what Arizonans have been doing for months, which perhaps is best described as “whatever the hell they want”—including eating and drinking inside at bars and restaurants so long as you wear a mask when you first walk through the door. 

Ducey refuses to enact a statewide mask mandate or make changes to his unusually relaxed restrictions on large events, indoor gatherings, and non-essential business openings. Driving around Tucson, I see packed parking lots at outlet malls, lines out the door at brunch places with indoor seating only, and sports bars with dozens of people hanging out inside without masks. Bowling alleys, arcades, and movie theaters are also open at half capacity, and indoor gyms at 25 percent occupancy.  

Compare that with California, which has the second-highest infection rate in the United States right now, with an average of 95.8 daily cases per 100,000 people. California is currently in crisis mode, with strict restrictions on indoor activities, and Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a stay-at-home order last month that shut down indoor and outdoor dining, among other things, until the numbers go down. 

In Arizona, it apparently doesn’t matter that the state is breaking nationwide records for infections: Life has gone on basically the same since the state opened up in May, after briefly enacting tighter restrictions in the spring. The summer months saw huge spikes in infection rates and hospitalizations when extreme heat made it more difficult to be outdoors. Now, even though Arizona has some of the most beautiful weather in the country—it was 70 and sunny Tuesday afternoon in Phoenix and Tucson—the infection rates and hospitalizations are higher than during the summer spike. The kind of social interaction currently taking place inside could easily be forced outdoors, but apparently that’s just not the kind of thing people here (elected officials and regular folks) want to deal with right now.

In early December, as the number of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations continued to rise, health care leaders in Arizona wrote a letter urging the state health department to immediately issue a statewide shelter-in-place order, end all indoor dining, and close athletic activities for at least a month to avoid a disaster. Ducey held a press conference days later thanking Arizonans for being “so responsible” over Thanksgiving (even though his own health department reported a spike after the holiday weekend), ignoring the recommendations of the health care leaders. He made no changes to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Days later, nurses at the Tucson Medical Center wrote a public letter to the city’s residents practically begging them to stay home ahead of Christmas. 

In Tucson, city leaders enacted a three-week-long 10 p.m. curfew after Thanksgiving but made no other mitigating changes. As public health experts I talked to about the efficacy of curfews pointed out, it does does little good to stop serving people drinks indoors at a bar at 10 p.m. when you’ve had hundreds of maskless patrons there throughout the day. 

Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of Arizonans taking this pandemic seriously and living in a new normal that follows all the guidelines we now know work to slow the spread of this deadly virus. So many of us have changed the way we live and are sticking to it because the pandemic is far from over. But as this Instagram account seems to show, Ducey’s twentysomething son, Jack, is not one of those people.  

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate