PHOENIX — Every day for the last 718 days, a member of the 12 News Digital Team has gone on to the state health department's website, copied down the day's latest COVID deaths and cases reported and updated them on our website.
That changed today. Monday Feb. 21, 2022 marked the last day we will put daily COVID numbers on our website. It is a change from what's become a daily practice for us.
The simple explanation is that the the Arizona Department of Health Services is changing how they supply data, shifting from a daily update to a weekly. It is a reflection, in the department director's words, of " ... COVID-19 metrics steadily declining and many other states doing the same." We can only present what's supplied. As ADHS shifts to weekly numbers, we will present weekly numbers.
The decision isn't made lightly. Like many of you, we have agonized over these numbers. We remember March 30, 2020, the first day there were double-digit deaths recorded. And we remember May 3, 2020, when the state broke 500 deaths. We felt relief when the numbers started to go down during the summer of 2020 -- and worry when they came up again around Thanksgiving. We remember Sept. 30, 2021, when the state broke 20,000 deaths and Jan. 11 of this year, on a day with more than 24,000 new cases reported, the total number of cases broke 1.5 million.
But after nearly two years of COVID numbers on the front page of our site, they've become part of the landscape. The audience skips over them. We want to provide value and context, not just numbers you see and move on from.
We also, as a newsroom, have struggled with what are meaningful numbers to represent. For instance, how different are the 4,273 new cases that were reported on July 14, 2020 from the 4,284 new cases reported on Feb. 12, 2022? The first number comes from a world in which no vaccine really existed, the second from a world in which it does. The second also comes from a world in which cases -- because of the vaccine -- don't necessarily reflect severity.
Our job is to provide you with context so you can make decisions. You need meaningful numbers. We're going to be working over the next days and months to give you the numbers and the context around them. You'll see graphs, interpretation and other ways of presenting the most recent COVID numbers.
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