Depending on where they live, Arizona s restaurant workers may have to wait a little longer for their chance to sign up for COVID-19 vaccines, despite the fact that their jobs often require interaction with customers.
The new plan, however, isn t uniform across the state. Individual counties are each developing their own plans, merging aspects of the original and the new, to form hybrid plans.
Additionally, the state has authorized allocation of the new, single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be used exclusively for vaccinating frontline workers. Johnson & Johnson vaccines will be distributed through employer-based vaccination events in coordination with local health departments, according to the Maricopa County vaccine website.
The concept of medical tourism is not new though it typically involves traveling internationally in order to get a treatment or procedure that is either unavailable or significantly more expensive in a person’s home country. (Think dental work, fertility treatments, or abortions.) But, as with nearly every other aspect of the pandemic, Covid vaccine tourism is somewhat uncharted territory. Like traditional medical tourism, it raises ethical and legal questions regarding equitable access to health care and services and patient safety.
At the same time, though, Covid vaccine tourism is different because it doesn’t involve cosmetic surgery procedures or experimental cancer surgeries that appeal to a limited number of people in this case, the commodity is something sought after by most adults around the world. Complicating things further is that from a general public health standpoint, we know that the more shots-in-arms, the better but where does fairness come into play? He
Advertisement: According to the latest report by Dr. Joe Gerald, a University of Arizona professor who creates weekly coronavirus epidemiology reports based on Arizona Department of Health Services data, the week ending Jan. 31 saw a 31% decrease in total COVID-19 cases from the week prior. In Pima County, coronavirus cases saw a 27% decrease the week ending Jan. 17 from the week before, Gerald reports. Data from the Pima County Health Department reflects a similar trend. The first week of January saw Pima County’s highest weekly number of COVID-19 cases at 8,860, while the following week dropped to 7,052 and the third week to 5,260. Week four reported 2,916 cases, but data from the last 4-7 days are still trickling in.
Advertisement: Yuma County Communications Director Kevin Tunell was busy helping the county “in full vaccine mode” Wednesday and was not available for an interview. But he did say that “it’s a fair stretch that COVID has had a large part in the number” of increased deaths in the county last year. The report on the increase in deaths comes as COVID-19 surpassed cancer and heart disease to become the leading cause of death in Arizona last year. And Arizona is not the only state seeing such surges, said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.