FILE PHOTO: coronavirus home test. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
COVID-19 deaths have reached 256 within the Bear River Health District, which includes Cache, Box Elder and Rich counties while the state COVID death toll is 4,953.
Included in the state health department’s weekly report were 13 deaths in Utah the last seven days, including a Box Elder county resident.
In other COVID-19 metrics, almost 68 percent of the state’s wastewater sites showed high levels of the virus in sewers. A test site in Hyrum was one of five across the state showing increasing levels of COVID-19.
A week ago four counties had high community transmission levels but this week the CDC said none of the state’s counties met that threshold.
Since the outbreak, 55,102 total positive cases have been found in the district, nearly 40,000 of them in Cache County.
There were 224 new cases in the district the last seven days and 68 percent of the northern Utah population (age 5+) has received at least one dose of the vaccine and 2,231 patients in northern Utah have been hospitalized with COVID. Utah’s Division of Health and Human Services reported 202 COVID patients in the state’s hospitals as of Thursday, including 25 in intensive care. Since the start of the pandemic there have been 37,684 hospitalizations due to COVID.
Almost 3,600 new cases were reported in the last week; that number does not include home tests. There have been 1,023,669 positive cases of COVID in Utah the last 28 months.
Just over two million Utahns are fully vaccinated — which is 63 percent of the population — and more than 980,655 have received at lease one booster shot.
Most of the current COVID-19 testing in Utah is done with home tests — which are not reported publicly.
Nearly 25,000 vaccine doses were administered the last seven days which brings the total doses administered in Utah to more than 5.3 million.