Arizona Adds 3,000 New Coronavirus Cases; Total Nears 120K

PHOENIX, AZ — Arizona public health officials reported more than 3,000 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday, bringing the state to just under 120,000 total cases.

Arizona added 3,038 confirmed cases in the past day, bringing the official case total to 119,930. Health officials also reported an additional 69 deaths from the coronavirus outbreak.

So far, there’s been more than 2,150 confirmed deaths from the virus in Arizona.

Hospital caseloads have surged since Arizona became one of the hot spots for the coronavirus after Gov. Doug Ducey relaxed stay-home orders and other restrictions in May. The state set a record on Friday with 3,485 patients hospitalized for COVID-19.

Amid the spike in cases, new research concludes that more than 90 percent of coronavirus samples from Arizona included in a recent genetic analysis have a mutation that researchers think makes the virus more infectious.

Researchers have analyzed more than 1,400 samples of the virus from patients, leading them to identify a mutated strain they believe could help explain the recent explosion of cases in the state, the Arizona Republic reported.

This mutated strain of the virus is the same one that researchers first identified in April as the dominant strain in Arizona, but has since changed the way it behaves.

"The earlier strains that came into Arizona didn't have this mutation and those strains didn't go on in most cases to cause any type of sustained outbreaks," said David Engelthaler, co-director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute’s Pathogen and Microbiome Division. "They typically fizzled out."

Read more via The Arizona Republic

As of Saturday, Maricopa County leads the state with the most confirmed cases by far. The county has 78,481 cases and close to 1,100 deaths.

Pima County currently has 11,443 cases and 326 deaths.

View more data by county on the Arizona Department of Health Services website.