PHOENIX — A spike in the number of COVID-19 deaths reported across Arizona has been attributed to new information being gathered by the state’s health department.
The Arizona Department of Health Services is now including deaths based on death certificate information. There were 67 deaths connected to the coronavirus on Friday, by far the largest single-day increase in reported deaths.
But AZDHS Director Cara Christ says 35 of the 67 new reported deaths stem from death certificate surveillance going back as far as April 12.
It would several days for a coroner to determine if a person died from COVID-19 if they weren’t undergoing direct treatment, so those deaths weren’t included by the state’s count until now.
“We don’t get a death certificate the same day a death occurs,” AZDHS spokesperson Chris Minnick explained. “So, we’re going to go back and look at all of these deaths moving forward. The team is looking at all deaths.”
The National Center for Health Statistics issued new guidelines for how states should include death certificate information this week, and Christ says Arizona will be taking that information into account moving forward.
Christ says the new information will make the state’s data model more accurate as health experts work to understand if Arizona has passed the worst of the pandemic. However, the state’s reported death total will rise sharply in the short-term.
“This puts the deaths on the day of the event and causes the deaths to be distributed throughout the ‘epi curve,’” Christ wrote on her director’s blog.
“This means there won’t be one spike of deaths on a single day, which allows for a more accurate picture of when COVID-19 related deaths truly occurred in Arizona and maintains consistency in the way the death data on the dashboard can be interpreted.”
The graph on AZDHS's website will reflect the day the person's death occurred.
Arizona also started a “Testing Blitz” initiative with a goal of getting as many as 20,000 people tested each Saturday for the first three weeks of May.
Reported cases of the virus are expected to rise in proportion with wider availability of COVID-19 testing. AZDHS says the testing increase coupled with the new death certificate information will paint a more complete picture as Gov. Doug Ducey continues to decide how he will reopen Arizona.
“This is the natural evolution of a public health investigation,” Minnick said. “This is a novel disease and we’ve implemented a new surveillance system.”