By Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror
Arizona may have hit a plateau in its daily number of new COVID-19 cases, but not necessarily in a good way, according to the head of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, which is closing tracking data on the state’s coronavirus crisis.
“The trend in the state right now is that we are plateauing a little bit. I don’t want to overemphasize that. But it does appear that we’ve hit sort of a steady state,” Joshua LaBaer, the institute’s executive director, said during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.
But here’s the catch: that steady state is about 3,500 new COVID cases per day. And that, he said, is unacceptably high.
“That is a car that, even though it’s going at a constant speed, is going at 95 miles an hour. It’s not a safe speed to be going. We don’t want to have 3,500 new cases every day,” he said.
Arizona is not seeing the kind of day-over-day growth that has characterized the outbreak in recent weeks, LaBaer said, but the numbers are still too high.
