Here’s How Many AZ Lives Could Have Been Saved With COVID Vaccines

ARIZONA — Thousands of COVID-19 deaths in Arizona — and about 319,000 nationally — could have been prevented after vaccines became widely available early last year, according to a new analysis by health researchers.

In Arizona, some 9,427 of 20,890 COVID-19 deaths, or 1,672 deaths per 1 million people, could have been prevented with vaccine protection, according to the analysis published at Brown School of Public Health’s Global Epidemics website.

A dashboard showing a state-by-state breakdown of preventable COVID-19 deaths from January 2021 through last month was released earlier this month as a descendant of the omicron variant becomes the dominant strain of the virus.

Also contributing to the analysis were researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health.

They say their analysis shows that since vaccines became widely available, every second COVID-19 death could have been prevented.

COVID-19 has killed more than 1 million people in the United States since the first deaths were reported in 2020. Daily reports of new COVID-19 infections have increased threefold since April, according to a database maintained by The New York Times, increasing in almost every U.S. state but especially in the Northeast and Midwest.

In those regions, The Times reported, case reports now are higher than they were in advance of last summer’s delta variant surge. However, with the availability of at-home tests whose results don’t show up in official counts, the number of people with COVID-19 infections may go undercounted.

On average, more than 300 people a day are dying, fewer than the average of 2,600 people who died daily at the height of the omicron surge, according to The Times.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Arizona have been creeping up again since April, but are still nowhere near the numbers we were seeing during the peak of the omicron variant in January.

There were around 7,200 cases reported during the week of May 8, compared to the more than 150,000 cases reported the week of Jan. 9, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. So far, the recent increase in cases has not put a strain on the local health care system, an ongoing concern for health care providers throughout the pandemic.

In Arizona, about 66 percent of eligible residents are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker. If you haven’t gotten a vaccine or boosters, they’re available several places in the Phoenix area and in Tucson, including at:

• CVS Pharmacy, 50 W. Jefferson St., Suite 140, in Phoenix.
• Fry's Pharmacy, 25 E. Jefferson St. in Phoenix.
• Safeway Pharmacy, 340 E. McDowell Road in Phoenix.
• El Rio-Congress Health Center, 839 W. Congress Street in Tucson.
• CVS Pharmacy, 825 E. University Boulevard, Suite 101, in Tucson.
• Walgreens Pharmacy, 1900 S. 6th Ave., in Tucson.

Everyone 12 and older is eligible for a booster shot, and federal health officials recommend that people 50 and older get a second booster shot. A CDC advisory panel was scheduled to meet Thursday to decide whether to recommend boosters for children ages 5-11, an age group where vaccine hesitancy is high.

Stefanie Friedhoff, a professor at Brown and one of the authors of the analysis, told National Public Radio the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was both “a remarkable success and a remarkable failure.”

The United States was the first to make vaccines available, Friedhoff said, but “did not start early on with the information campaigns about why vaccines are important.”

“We underestimated dramatically the investment it would take to get people familiarized with vaccines because, by and large, we haven't had a deadly disease like this, so people have become estranged from the important impact of vaccination,” she told NPR.

Once the vaccines were available, more lives could have been saved in the months since vaccines became available. States where the most lives could have been saved tended to have high rates of vaccine hesitancy. They are ranked by the deaths per 1 million people that could have been prevented with vaccines:

• West Virginia: 3,350 of 5,483 deaths, or 2,337.6 deaths per 1 million people.

• Wyoming: 938 of 1,374 deaths, or 2,109.4 deaths per 1 million people.

• Tennessee: 11,047 of 18,98 deaths, or 2,076.7 per 1 million people.

• Kentucky: 7,154 of 12,419 deaths, or 2,065.0 per 1 million people.

• Oklahoma: 5,833 of 11,744 deaths, or 1,939.9 per 1 million people.

Places with high vaccine compliance had the fewest preventable deaths. They include:

• Washington, D.C.: 164 of 548 deaths, or 284.6 per 1 million people.

• Massachusetts: 1,957 of 7,761 deaths, or 353.4 per 1 million people.

• Puerto Rico: 1,232 of 2,681 deaths, or 470.5 per 1 million people.

• Vermont: 287 of 498 deaths, or 562.3 per 1 million people.

• Hawaii: 734 of 1,128 deaths, or 657.9 per 1 million people.

» For more on the mapping project, go to National Public Radio, read the story and listen to the four-minute interview with Stefanie Friedhoff.