On Friday, Utah’s governor said he wants to start softening COVID-19 restrictions by May 1st. Today the state health department chimed in on what needs to happen before communities re-open.
Last week the state epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn focused on alerting the public that anyone with mild symptoms of COVID-19 can and should be tested, the result was 22,500 tests administered over seven days.
“We’re making sure that all of our jurisdictions have access to testing now," Dunn explained. "We've set up mobile units that can go to the rural setting that might not have direct access to a hospital or a drive through site and provide testing capacity that way. We're also working with our testing partners to set up more drive through sites across the state, so that access to testing is adequate everywhere.”
A mobile testing site at Park City High School was busy Friday and Saturday. On Monday afternoon the mobile site at Kamas Library had a couple dozen people in line. The mobile unit moves to the Summit County fairgrounds Tuesday afternoon and Ecker Hill Junior High on Wednesday.
Dr. Dunn also says anti-body testing pilots—which can show if someone has been exposed to COVID-19—may be in Utah within the next week or two. A focus this week for the department of health is understanding why some populations bear a larger burden than others.
“We're going to be working with the impacted local health districts and community based organizations representing these populations to understand and address barriers to testing care and isolation," Dunn continued. "Health inequities are an unfortunate part of our society, and this pandemic is definitely bringing them to the forefront.”
Last Friday Utah Governor Gary Herbert unveiled the Utah Leads Together 2.0 plan. The plan targets May 1st as an initial date to see a gradual decrease in restrictions on social distancing. Dr. Dunn shared her thoughts on the timing of the lifting of restrictions.
“So we're looking at our trends of growth rate and cases and we are starting to see a little bit of a flattening of the curve over the past week or so," Dunn said. "We're evaluating that data further. We had some lower testing done last week and that can influence how many cases we identify. So, we want to be able to account for that. So, we’ll definitely want to watch the next week or so to ensure that our flattening of the curve continues and that we start seeing a decrease. So those are some of the metrics we're going to be watching at the Department of Health.”
Dunn says they’re also taking into consideration adequate healthcare capacity as they move closer to lifted restrictions.
“Utah Leads 2.0 is set to roll out slowly," Dunn explained. "So, we're not going from the restrictions we have currently to everything being open the way it was pre-COVID. So, the gradual relaxation of restrictions will allow us to assess the impact of each relaxation and see how that impacts our number of cases. Then if we need to and we see an increase you know put those restrictions back in place, before we start loosening them even more.”
The Utah Leads Together 2.0 plan can be found here.
