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SALT LAKE CITY – As Utah Governor Spencer Cox announced vaccine eligibility earlier than expected on Thursday, he remained optimistic about a return to normal this summer.
Pointing to his mask, Cox firmly declared that his days are numbered.
“I’m telling you, I won’t be wearing this (mask) on July 4. I’m going on a parade somewhere,” Cox said at a press conference Thursday morning. “If I’m wrong, I’ll come here and admit I’m wrong, and we’ll do something different.”
Utah Department of Health state epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn has been more pragmatic. She said normalcy by the summer is “certainly possible” but it will take an effort from everyone in the state to continue wearing masks, social distancing, limiting gatherings and to practice all the other public health measures that state officials have been preaching for the past year. .
At the press conference where Cox, always an enthusiastic optimist, became passionate about the current COVID-19 situation in Utah, the governor announced that residents of the state aged 16 and older who have certain comorbidities are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, several days earlier. provided that. This population represents approximately 240,000 Utahn, said the governor.
Previously, the eligibility date for Utahns with co-morbidities was March 1, but Cox has said these people are eligible as of now. The full list of comorbidities that make a person eligible for the vaccine is available at coronavirus.utah.gov/vaccine-distribution/#eligible.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has only approved the Pfizer vaccine for people aged 16 and 17, Cox said. If people in this age group want to be vaccinated, they should make an appointment at a vaccination center that provides the Pfizer vaccine, the governor added. Not all immunization clinics have the Pfizer vaccine, and a list of clinics that do have it will be provided at coronavirus.utah.gov/vaccine.
Cox said he was focusing on shooting guns as quickly as possible, especially for the most vulnerable populations rather than looking at the population of the state as a whole.
“We are committed to speeding up eligibility where possible,” Cox said.
The governor also announced Thursday that people who want to be vaccinated no longer need to wait to make an appointment in their home country. If you can find an appointment available in another region, you can now book an appointment there. However, you must make an appointment for the second dose of the vaccine in the same county where you made an appointment for the first dose, Cox said.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox provided an update on the COVID-19 pandemic at a press conference Thursday. Utah Department of Health state epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn also spoke at the press conference. Watch the replay here.
Create a vaccination ground
At one point during the fight against COVID-19 in Utah, intensive care units may have been hours of being completely overwhelmed, Cox said. State leaders almost reached a point where they needed to set up a triage intensive care unit at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy to treat the huge number of patients with the disease, he said. .
But that did not happen. Now, instead of a triage intensive care unit, the exhibition center is used to administer vaccines.
“We underestimate the positivity of what’s going on there,” Cox said.
About 70% of Utahns aged 70 and over have now been vaccinated, according to Cox. Some counties in Utah have vaccinated nearly 80% of that population in their areas, he added.
What’s more, about 29% of the 65 to 69 age group now have at least one dose, Cox said. Eligibility opened to this population last Thursday and vaccinations for these people are expected to continue for several weeks.
Yet an analysis from the Wall Street Journal indicates that Utah vaccinated only 11.4% of its total population with at least one dose – the lowest of any state.
Cox said he hates the way the newspaper calculated this statistic because it ignores Utah’s large population of children who are ineligible for vaccines. Census data shows that about 29% of Utah’s population is under the age of 18, the largest percentage in the country.
“We can’t change that formula,” Cox said. “All we can do is get the gun shots that reach us, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The disproportionate number of children in Utah also affects the number of vaccines the federal government allocates in Utah, Cox said. Bad weather last week prevented a shipment of 36,000 Moderna vaccines from arriving in Utah, which also delayed the state slightly, the governor added. But those doses have now arrived in the state and Utah is catching up, he said.
Cox said he would rather have a large percentage of people aged 70 and over vaccinated than a smaller percentage of Utah’s total population, as the majority of COVID-19 deaths have been in Utahns over 70 years old.
“This is where Utah is doing amazingly again,” Cox said. “This is where we focus.”
Next week, the state will release a plan to immunize more members of traditionally underserved populations, such as Hispanics and Latinos and Pacific Islanders, who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Cox said. The plan has already been implemented in practice but will be made public next week, he said.
Health Department data shows minority groups are vaccinated at a much lower rate than white Utahns. Whites are vaccinated at a rate of nearly 14,000 vaccinations per 100,000 people and represent over 60% of the total vaccines administered in the state so far.
Hispanics and Latinos have been vaccinated at a rate of only 4,720 per 100,000 population, and the rate for Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders is just under 3,600 per 100,000 population.
For about a third of the vaccines given, the race of the person receiving the dose is unknown, according to the Department of Health’s website, so the data may not be a completely accurate representation of the ethnicities that are vaccinated. Even so, the state intends to work with community partners to get the vaccine in these underserved communities, Cox said.
State leaders will work with churches and other community partners to make this happen and to reduce vaccine reluctance in those communities, Cox said. Health officials will work to spread the word that vaccines are safe and effective to those who still have reservations.
Cox said that instead of focusing on the number of people not getting vaccinated, the state has shifted to a “state of mind of plenty” in anticipation of the much larger amounts of vaccine doses that are expected. be allocated to the state in the weeks and months to come.
“In a few weeks we will have more vaccines than we know what to do,” the governor joked. “We know what to do with it. … From April and May our biggest concern will be reluctance to vaccinate, for example how to convince people to get vaccinated, because we have so many. And that’s really where our focus needs to be. “
New COVID-19 cases
On Thursday, the number of COVID-19 cases in Utah increased by 832, with 11 additional deaths and 18,563 additional vaccinations reported, according to the Utah Department of Health. There are approximately 18,561 active cases of COVID-19 in Utah.
Four of the deaths occurred last month, but are still under investigation by the state medical examiner’s office, the health department said. The state also reported 18,563 additional vaccinations on Thursday.
The sliding average number of positive cases per day over seven days is now 723, according to the health department. The positive test rate per day for this period of time reported with the “people over people” method is now 12.4%. The seven-day average positive test rate per day calculated with the “test-to-test” method is now 5.7%.
There are 221 COVID-19 patients currently hospitalized in Utah, including 87 in intensive care, state data shows. About 74% of all intensive care unit beds in Utah are occupied Thursday, including about 77% of intensive care beds at the state’s 16 referral hospitals. About 53% of non-ICU hospital beds are occupied in Utah, according to state data.
A total of 660,444 vaccines have been administered in the state, up from 641,881 on Wednesday. Of those, 229,526 are second doses of the vaccine, according to state data.
New figures from Thursday show a 0.2% increase in positive cases since Wednesday. Of the 2,189,176 people tested for COVID-19 in Utah so far, 16.9% have tested positive for the disease. The total number of tests performed rose to 3,765,520 on Thursday, up 21,176 from Wednesday. Of those, 8,582 were tests of people who had not previously been tested for COVID-19.
The 11 deaths reported Thursday were:
- Davis County woman aged 65 to 84 hospitalized after death
- Davis County woman over 85 living in long-term care facility
- Salt Lake County man who was between 65 and 84 and was hospitalized when he died
- Salt Lake County man aged 25 to 44 who was not hospitalized when he died
- A woman from Tooele County who was between 45 and 64 and who was not hospitalized when she died
- Woman from Tooele County who was over 85 and was hospitalized after her death
- Utah County Woman Over 85 Long Term Care Resident
- Utah County Woman 65-84 Long-Term Care Resident
- Utah County man over 85 living in long-term care facility
- Weber County woman aged 65 to 84 admitted to hospital after death
- Weber County man aged 45 to 64 who was not hospitalized when he died
Thursday’s totals give Utah 369,433 total confirmed cases, with 14,597 total hospitalizations and 1,890 total deaths from the disease. It is now estimated that a total of 348,982 cases of COVID-19 in Utah have been recovered.
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