FILE PHOTO: coronavirus home test. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
The first COVID report this year from the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) — Jan. 3 — listed 14,754 cases from the four-day New Year’s weekend (3,700 each day).
Today’s report, nine weeks later, includes 543 new cases from the weekend, or 181 a day.
The state’s updated seven-day average that day in early-January was 3,346 a day; now it’s 282 cases a day.
Another downward trending metric is hospitalizations. Today at the start of a new week, 261 Utahns are hospitalized with COVID, the lowest it has been in eight months. There are 59 of those patients in intensive care units. More than 33,000 Utahns have been hospitalized with COVID the last 24 months.
In other news Monday from the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), the state is reporting nine COVID deaths since Friday, including a man from Box Elder County between 65-84 years of age who was a resident of a longterm care facility. It is the 228th death in northern Utah. More than 4,400 Utahns have died from COVID-19.
Total COVID cases in Utah in 24 months of the pandemic now number more than 924,000. The new total of cases from the weekend includes 241 Friday, 206 Saturday and 102 Sunday.
There were 80 new COVID cases found in northern Utah in the last seven days. The district’s total case count grew to 51,345 and within the district 1,999 people have been hospitalized over the course of the pandemic. The Bear River Health Department’s weekly Monday report indicates 59 percent of the population of northern is fully vaccinated.
A total of 8,981 people were tested since Friday and almost five million Utahns have been tested the last 24 months with over nine million tests administered since the start of the pandemic.
The number of Utah’s fully vaccinated is over 1.98 million, more than 61 percent of the state’s population, but only 27 percent have gotten a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The new seven-day rolling average for percent positivity of “people over people” is 9.4 percent and the rolling seven-day average for percent positivity of “tests over tests” is 6.0 percent.