In national spotlight with COVID-19, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey avoids aggressive response

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Doug Ducey brushed off criticism he was acting too slowly to curb its spread by pointing to other parts of the country.

"What's going on in Arizona is dramatically different than what's going on in New York and New Jersey," he said during a March 27 radio interview, explaining why several other governors had closed schools, shuttered restaurants and issued stay-at-home orders before he had.

"We're in a position where we can prepare and we can plan," Ducey said. 

For a few months, that was true.

But now — a month after Ducey allowed his statewide stay-at-home order to expire, despite warnings from some epidemiologists — the state has drawn national attention for the steep incline of its COVID-19 curve. And other state leaders, such as Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, are eyeing Arizona the way Ducey once looked at New York.

As he has done throughout the pandemic, the governor waited until the data and public pressure were overwhelming to implement measures to combat the virus.

By the time he announced Wednesday that he would let local governments impose mask policies and expand contact tracing, hospitals were reporting more than 2,000 new cases a day and nearly 1,000 medical professionals had begged for a statewide mask mandate.

At a press briefing, he acknowledged the state was "headed in the wrong direction” and that he’d made "mistakes" — statements that went further than those from Republican governors in similarly hard-hit Florida and Texas.

But he continued to resist taking more aggressive action, indicating he had no plans to pause the state’s reopening, as Utah’s governor has done, or implement the type of statewide mask requirements seen in New Jersey, New York and elsewhere. Instead, he repeatedly stressed personal responsibility.

"COVID-19 is widespread in Arizona," he said. "I'm asking Arizonans to behave responsibly so they can protect each other."

How other governors are responding

In Arizona, hospitals have reported more than 49,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date, with 3,246 of those reported on Friday alone. Inpatient beds and ventilators in use for suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients hit their highest-ever numbers Thursday. At least 1,338 Arizonans had died of the disease as of Saturday morning.

Johns Hopkins University data indicated nine other states were seeing record-high seven-day averages of new COVID-19 cases per day as of Thursday: Alabama, California, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas. Case numbers in several others, including Michigan and Utah, are spiking as well.

Leaders of those states have responded in vastly different ways, and not always in line with their political bases.

The governors of Utah, Oregon and Nevada — Republican Gary Herbert and Democrats Kate Brown and Steve Sisolak, respectively — have halted their state’s reopening plans while they get a handle on infections, for example. 

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is expected to announce a statewide mask requirement next week, as governors in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have done.

And on Friday, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said he wouldn’t “rule anything out” as a possible strategy, including a new shutdown.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has dismissed suggestions the state could be the next COVID-19 epicenter, neither donning a mask nor stressing a need for social distancing. He has welcomed the Republican National Convention to Jacksonville, waved the starting flag at a NASCAR race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and wants K-12 schools to reopen in August at "full capacity,” according to media reports. 

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has worn a mask but so far has prohibited local governments from penalizing residents for not covering their faces. As hospitalization numbers hit record highs earlier this week, he blamed 20-somethings and lax social distancing at bars for part of the problem.

Both have pointed to expanded testing to explain spiraling caseloads, an approach encouraged by Vice President Mike Pence. Though increased testing availability has contributed to increases in those states, growing percentages of positive test results indicate community spread is also at play, something Ducey acknowledged Wednesday. 

Ducey’s approach seems to be most in line with that of Gov. Henry McMaster, a South Carolina Republican. 

Both have said they have no plans to dial back the reopening of businesses, though Ducey imposed additional safety rules on Arizona outfits this week. 

Both have stepped up efforts to encourage mask use and allowed cities to implement mask requirements but have resisted statewide mask mandates. 

And both have emphasized “personal responsibility” as the larger answer to infection upticks though McMaster has put a finer point on it than Ducey.

"Be smart," McMaster said during a news briefing last week. "There's a lot of stupid floating out there."  

Would Ducey consider rollback?

Earlier this month, Republican political analyst Chuck Coughlin said he believed Ducey would only consider an economic shutdown or rollback in the face of a hospital capacity crisis like the one seen in northern Italy.

When the pandemic hit Lombardy, overwhelmed doctors with limited resources were forced to decide which near-death patients to prioritize.

“Remember what the point of the (original) shutdown was: It was to avoid an overrun of ICU beds, an overtaxation of our health care system where people couldn’t get care when they needed it," Coughlin told The Arizona Republic.

"I think that would be the only issue — if the health care community came to him and said, ‘Hey, we can’t provide care. People are getting denied the health care that they need because we’re overtaxed, we’re overrun,'" he said.

Indeed, Ducey has focused on ensuring that Arizonans sick with COVID-19 and other emergency conditions can get the care they need throughout the pandemic, continually using it as a key yardstick despite objections from those who have asked him to focus more on controlling infections.

As long as hospitals have inpatient, intensive care and ventilator capacity, he’s indicated he has no plans to intervene in the public’s "voluntary events" — including a rally that President Donald Trump has planned for Arizona on Tuesday, which Ducey is expected to attend. 

That's despite the fact the hospital capacity situation could change quickly if enough people are admitted more quickly than they are discharged.

How likely that is remains unclear, as many people sickened in the weeks Ducey declined to act may not have yet shown up in the state's already "concerning" data, given the virus's incubation time of up to 14 days. For the same reason, the effects of mask mandates now being weighed by cities from Nogales to Flagstaff likely won't be felt in state pandemic data for at least two weeks.

One thing’s for sure, though: No matter how Ducey proceeds, it won’t make everyone happy. For every lawmaker or constituent who believes he’s overreacted and overstepped, there’s one who feels he’s acted too slowly and timidly.

"I guess different people can look at data in different ways," Ducey said Wednesday, when asked about the dueling perspectives on whether the state had reopened too soon.

"What I want to tell everyone is we're making every decision with the best information that we have to protect that public health of Arizonans throughout our state … and we'll continue to do that."

Reach the reporter at maria.polletta@arizonarepublic.com or 602-653-6807. Follow her on Twitter @mpolletta.

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