perhaps avoiding huge number of deaths would have been a better hope

@KT you are making several comments that I do not understand. First of all I did not refere to the media for information, but to science, mentioning top institutes such as Johns Hopkins University in the USA and Imperial Colgge in London. So Arizona is getting out of control, not bevause they say that on MSNBC, but because the data shows and predicts exponential growth.

The second point is that you say is that "which have implications that are not true." Maybe you are just nitpicking - when there is no control as you suggest, it cannot get out of control . But then you say that the people have the political power., contradicting yourself.

As to the geographical aspects of Arizona, that is far from unique, think of SWeden and Finland.

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RandLS, KT, you both make valid points. In Western Australia we realised that transmission into small communities would very quickly overwhelm the local hospital system and the indigenous communities would suffer greatly, so we put in travel bans between regions. The cities were always the starting point from returning travellers (many sadly from the US) so at the same time as mandating 14 day quarantine in hotels for returning travellers, we shut our state borders and broke the state up into 8 regions where only essential workers could travel between. As we got on top of it we were able to relax the restrictions, but only when we had very few if any locally transmitted cases. Isolation is your friend in a pandemic. You have to use it. In a population of almost 3 million, we have had 606 cases (only 4 left active) and sadly 9 deaths. We have tested 167,201. Our state is somewhat bigger than Arizona 2.64 million sqkm compared to your 295,000sqkm, but principal very similar.

On another sensitive topic, we have one police force covering our entire state. How many different police forces in Arizona?

Sorry should have done some research, it appears Arizona has 141 law enforcement agencies employing 14 591 sworn officers about 224 per 100K residents, WA approx 234 per 100K residents approx 6787 sworn officers. Somewhat simpler and cheaper to police me thinks, with everyone on the same page, trained the same, paid the same, treated the same, although still only 21% female and not enough indigenous officers.

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I mention the Police KT from the perspective of why so many police forces? Wouldn't it be logical for the state to pay for the state police and they handle everything? How did it come about that this is not the case?

Particularly easy for a medium

Phil - I don't know the exact reason why there are so many police forces. In America, there are numerous federal forces, each state has state police and/or investigative forces, each county has sheriffs, each city has police forces. The policing needs in Oro Valley are radically different from the policing needs in New York City. It has to do with state's rights and local control over government.

That's the one topic the panel at the hearing yesterday was very clear about. (I listened/watched almost the whole thing, a lot of time, but well worth it.) Fauci kept repeating: The make-up of this country is extremely diverse. Regions vary greatly, can't apply the same tactics to NY that one would to Cheyenne. There is no blanket answer, because they don't know enough specifics about the virus yet. And there is hope for a vaccine, and he was being carefully optimistic about it (because why do a job that you think is fruitless), minimum 1 1/

1 1/2 - 2 years before an effective vaccine is developed. Everyone needs to wear a mask. He said it many, many times. In my state it is kids under 2 years old. That's a big difference between here

& where KT lives.

Sorry.

For those of you who away from the action in the US, this was a 5

5+ hour congressional hearing (teleconferenced). On the panel were Dr. Redfield ( head of CDC), Dr. Fauci (NIAID Director), Admiral Giroir, MD (oversees all testing capacity in the US), and Dr. Stephen Hahn (FDA Commissioner).

hk - I watched most of it too while trying to work at the same time :). It is clear, Americans have to step up and do the right thing. There is no magic wand in the hands of government or science. I will be shocked if we get a vaccine in under 2 years.

Agreed KT. It would behoove every American to watch it.

clicker - gack, need a new mouse

Smoking mouse. Not a Medium. 8.

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Phil - i would love to hear how laws/ordinances are broken down by region in AU. That's the primary reason for so many different police forces here in the US...every governing region must have officers that can enforce the laws/ordinances. The only office that is mandated by law is the county sheriff. Every county the US must, by law, have a sheriff's department. They are the default officers in any area, no matter how sparsely populated. States have their own laws, and thus their own state-level forces...in many these are the highway patrol, though their jurisdiction isn't limited to just that. As areas become more heavily populated, municipalities create police forces to be more local and dedicated and we end up with city level police forces. The only one i dont comprehend is county police. Why have an unelected police chief when you could just invest more heavily in the sheriff's office that already exists (sheriff's are elected officials).

To clarify it just a bit more (as an answer to your question about state police forces), the reason we cannot handle things in that way is that a state officer has no authority to enforce a local law at the city or county level. Additionally, they wouldn't necessarily even know about all the local ordinances to be able to effectively enforce them. We're very big on pushing governance as close to home as possible. Well, we used to be at least. ;)

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The number of new Covid-19 cases is not a very meaningful statistic. More meaningful would be the number of new hospital admissions due to Covid-19. The same trope was used by the fake news about the state of Florida. At the very same time they were reporting a spike in new Covid-19 cases in Florida, the number of hospital admissions due to Covid-19 was the lowest since the first week of April. What was going on? Well, first of all a large portion of the new cases were in young people, many of them asymptomatic. It turns out that Florida had just beefed up their testing program. So the spike in new cases was due at least in part to improved testing! I will be watching Arizona with interest to see if there is a corresponding spike in hospital admissions or deaths due to Covid-19.

I just found the Arizona web page reporting on Covid-19. Guess what? While it is true that new cases has spiked, the number of hospitalizations has dropped. If I am interpreting the data correctly, hospitalizations are lower now than they have been since last March.

Here is the Arizona web page on Covid-19:
https://azdhs.gov/preparedness/epid\nemiology-disease-control/infectious-disease-e\npidemiology/covid-19/dashboards/index.php

If you try to look up the web page I just referenced be aware that the Chatterbox adds "\n"s to the URL, so you need to strip them out to get the URL to work.