Utah begins to see herd immunity, Intermountain doctor says



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The state reports fewer than 600 new cases and one additional death.

(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Nurses test for COVID-19 at the Test Utah site in Herriman on Friday, February 5, 2021.

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Utah “is slowly starting to see some population immunity” – also known as herd immunity, an infectious disease physician at Intermountain Healthcare said Tuesday.

Dr Brandon Webb pointed to the seven-day moving average of around 1,000 new cases per day, which roughly matches the state’s situation in October.

“A thousand a day is still too high,” Webb said. “But we are very happy to see that these are decreasing” because of the social distancing of people, the wearing of masks, the vaccination – and because about 180,000 Utahns have recovered from COVID-19 during of the last three months.

“We are probably at a little less than 20% [immunity] That much. … It’s not enough, but it helps, ”said Webb. “And it’s a very important thing to see more and more of the immune population, because to couple that with social distancing [and] masking is the count of our case. “

For the second day in a row, the number of new COVID-19 cases 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 main point here. “

He said it was “unclear” if Utah was hit with variants of the coronavirus because so little testing is done for them. Health experts are monitoring re-infection rates and vaccine failures, which provide indirect evidence of variants, and “at least at this point we don’t see strong signals that we have a dominant strain here in the world.” State. But we continue to monitor very carefully.

Webb also warned people who received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine to continue taking precautions – socially distancing and wearing masks.

“We are seeing too many cases of acute COVID in people who have received their first dose. … You have very little immunity for the first two weeks after receiving the first dose, ”he says. The data, he added, shows that “you are not fully immune until you have received the full two-dose series for these MRA vaccines. … With the availability of these vaccines, we still need people to be vigilant even after that first dose and during the second round of doses.

Vaccinations reported the day before / total vaccinations • 7.952 / 532.985.

Number of Utahn who received two doses • 164,775.

Cases reported the day before • 591.

Deaths reported the day before • A – a man eighty-five or over in Salt Lake County.

Hospitalizations reported the day before • 272. It is less than two compared to Monday. Of those currently hospitalized, 106 are in intensive care units – two more than Monday.

Tests reported the day before • 4,015 people were tested for the first time. A total of 9,985 people were tested.

Percentage of positive tests • Under the original state method, the rate is 14.7%. This is more than the seven-day average of 13.7%.

His new method counts all test results, including repeated testing of the same individual. The current rate is now 5.9%, slightly lower than the seven-day average of 6.4%.

[Read more: Utah is changing how it measures the rate of positive COVID-19 tests. Here’s what that means.]

Totals to date • 362,347 cases; 1,797 deaths; 14,239 hospitalizations; 2,129,525 people tested.

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