The state reports less than 600 new cases and one more death.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Nurses are testing COVID-19 on the Utah Test site in Herriman on Friday, February 5, 2021.
Utah is “slowly beginning to see some immunity in the population” – also known as herd immunity, an infectious disease doctor at Intermountain Healthcare said on Tuesday.
Dr. Brandon Webb pointed to the average seven-day average of about 1,000 new cases a day, which is about where the state was in October.
“A thousand a day is still too much,” Webb said. “But we are very pleased to see that they are declining,” due to people’s social distancing, wearing masks, vaccination – and because about 180,000 Utahns have been recovered from COVID-19 in the last three months.
“We are probably just under 20% [immunity] At this point. “It’s not enough, but it helps,” Webb said. “And it is very important to see more and more immune populations, because coupling this with social distancing [and] masking, makes us the countdown to our case. ”
For the second day in a row, the number of new cases of COVID-19 reported in Utah is well below 1,000. After reporting 462 cases on Monday, the Department of Health reported 591 positive tests on Tuesday.
Webb said the state was in a “race between vaccines and variants”, adding: “We can’t go fast enough. This is the bottom line here. “
He said it was “hard to know” if Utah was hit by coronavirus variants because so few tests were done for them. Health experts are monitoring reinfection rates and vaccine failures, which provide indirect evidence of variants and “at least at this time, we are not seeing strong signs that we have a dominant strain here in the state. But we continue to watch very closely. ”
Webb also warned people who received their first dose of coronavirus vaccine to continue taking precautions – socially remote and wearing masks.
“We see too many cases of acute COVID in people who received their first dose. “You have very little immunity in the first two weeks after receiving the first dose,” he said. The data, he added, show that “you are not fully immune until you have the full two-dose series for those MRNA vaccines. … With the availability of these vaccines, we still need people to be vigilant even after the first dose and until the second dose. ”
Vaccinations reported in previous / total day vaccinations 7,952 / 532,985.
Number of Utahns who received two doses • 164,775.
Cases reported the other day • 591.
Deaths reported last day • One – a man aged 85 or over in Salt Lake County.
Hospitalizations reported last day • 272. Decreased two months. Of those currently hospitalized, 106 are in intensive care units – two more than months.
Tests reported the other day • 4,015 people were tested for the first time. A total of 9,985 people were tested.
Percentage of positive tests • According to the initial method of the state, the rate is 14.7%. This is higher than the seven-day average of 13.7%.
His new method counts all test results, including repeated tests of the same individual. Today’s rate is now 5.9%, slightly lower than the seven-day average of 6.4%.
Totals so far • 362,347 cases; 1,797 deaths; 14,239 hospitalizations; 2,129,525 people tested.