FILE PHOTO – vaccine clinic. Photo by Alex Mecl on Unsplash
During his Thursday press briefing Gov. Spencer Cox had a message for Utahns who have yet to be vaccinated.
“To all of you I want to say, now is your time,” Gov. Cox exclaimed. “We’re ready for you, we have ample doses. We are starting to cross that threshold between where demand has outweighed supply, now supply is starting to outweigh demand.
“We have lots of demand in almost all of our counties. Salt Lake County is still booked but we’re moving doses here so we can deal with that demand here. And now is the time.”
He said two more counties — Carbon and Sevier — have moved down in the transmission index, from moderate to low, while Grand County has become the only county moving back into high transmission.
“This is just a reminder, again, that the pandemic is not over,” Gov. Cox added, “although we are getting closer and over the next few weeks as more and more people achieve that fully vaccinated status, we’ll have great protection, and we hope and expect those numbers to start to come down.”
Thursday’s case count was down to 472, 118 fewer cases than Wednesday, while the numbers in the state’s three northern most counties declined from 59 Wednesday to 23 Thursday.
One more coronavirus death was reported Thursday, a woman from Summit County, between 45-64 years, who was hospitalized at the time of her death. Utah’s COVID death toll has reached 2,178 in the 13 months of the pandemic
The total positive cases in Cache, Box Elder and Rich counties have grown to 21,232.
From the start of the pandemic there have been 394,334 positive coronavirus cases in Utah.
The state health department said 34,402 more vaccines were administered since Wednesday and vaccinations in Utah now total almost 1.99 million. The number of fully vaccinated Utahns is 840,382.
More than 2.5 million Utahns have been tested as of Thursday and there have been over 4.52 million total tests administered in the state. Since Wednesday 6,650 people were tested for the first time and a total of 16,394 tests were administered.
Idaho’s latest numbers show 185,759 confirmed coronavirus cases and 2,028 COVID-19 deaths. In the three southeast Idaho counties case counts include 1,169 positive cases in Franklin County, 376 in Bear Lake County and 353 in Oneida County.