COVID-19 community levels: 7/28/2022
COVID-19 Community Levels is a tool to help communities decide what prevention steps to take based on the latest data.
According to the CDC’s COVID-19 Community Levels, high level counties are Apache, Clark, Coconino, Gila, La Paz, Maricopa, Mohave, Navajo, Pinal, Yavapai and Yuma.
Medium level: Cochise, Graham, Greenlee, Pima, Santa Cruz and Washington.
At all levels including the low level, prevention steps include:
Stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines
Get tested if you have symptoms
At the medium level, if you are at high risk for severe illness, talk to your healthcare provider about whether you need to wear a mask and take other precautions.
At the high level, wear a mask indoors in public. Additional precautions may be needed for people at high risk for severe illness.
Levels can be low, medium, or high and are determined by looking at hospital beds being used, hospital admissions, and the total number of new COVID-19 cases in an area.
State of the virus
Update for July 21
Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all higher than they have been at nearly any point this summer as the BA.5 variant continues to spread across the United States.
The number of new cases announced each day has hovered near 130,000 for several days, and all but a few states have seen steady increases over the past two weeks. The official case numbers are seen as a significant undercount because many people have chosen to use home tests or are forgoing tests altogether.
The impacts of this surge can be felt across the country, from California, where known cases are higher than they have been in almost six months, to New York, where more people with Covid are hospitalized today than at the height of last year's Delta wave.
Hospitalizations are also steadily increasing nationally. More than 41,000 people are currently hospitalized with the coronavirus across the country, an increase of 19 percent over the past two weeks.
Death data remains volatile following a series of reporting delays related to summer holidays, but deaths are increasing. After two months when daily death numbers rarely rose above 400, the average has recently grown to more than 420 people dying of Covid in this country each day.
What the BA.5 Subvariant Could Mean for the United States
The most transmissible variant yet of the coronavirus is threatening a fresh wave of infections in the United States, even among those who have recovered from the virus fairly recently.