Vaccine
As Utah’s COVID case counts continue to spike hospitalizations for the coronavirus grew by 11 Tuesday, to 231, and 92 of those patients are in intensive care.
During a media briefing Tuesday infectious diseases physician Dr. Eddie Stenehjem explained what’s happening.
“The vast majority of the patients that are being admitted are in the unvaccinated population,” he said. “That’s just really disappointing because these are preventable hospitalizations.”
There were 471 new positive coronavirus cases reported across Utah Tuesday by the state health department which leaves the total of cases in 16 months of the pandemic at 420,685.
The deaths of two Salt Lake County residents and one from Davis County since Monday means 2,402 Utahns have lost their lives to the coronavirus since March, 2020.
Recent case counts in northern Utah have been fairly steady including 24 since Monday. A total of 22,559 residents of Cache, Box Elder and Rich Counties have contracted the virus.
The Bear River Health District (BRHD) reported 22,224 of all cases in northern Utah are classified as “recovered.” To date 972 have been hospitalized in the district during the pandemic and there have been 112 coronavirus deaths.
Tuesday BRHD said 53.6 percent of all the district’s residents are fully vaccinated (69,982 people) including 56.4 percent of Cache County residents, 48.2 percent in Box Elder County and 48.0 percent in Rich County. A total of 148,139 doses have been administered in northern Utah.
Tuesday the rolling seven-day average for new cases spiked to 490 per day.
Other metrics have not stopped growing including the rolling seven-day average for percent positivity of “people over people” which is up from 12.3 percent to 12.9 percent while the rolling seven-day average for percent positivity of “tests over tests,” jumped to 8.7 percent from 8.2 percent.
The latest news from Idaho shows 2,165 coronavirus deaths with 196,128 confirmed COVID-19 cases. In the three southeast Idaho counties case counts include 1,238 positive cases in Franklin County, 402 in Bear Lake County and 368 in Oneida County.