While the state health department continues to improve contact tracing and testing. The effect of the state entering into the stabilization phase of their COVID-19 plan won’t be known for another few weeks.
Utah epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn reported some good news Monday afternoon regarding where positive cases in the state are coming from at this point.
“People with unknown exposure or what we call community spread cases is dropping,” Dunn explained. “Only 11% of cases are considered to be community spread, 60% were exposed by someone in their household, and 25% were exposed to someone they know outside of their household, and only four percent were exposed at their workplace.”
Last Friday the state moved from the Red color-coded high alert phase to the orange color coded stabilization phase. Dunn says they do have concerns that re-opening could lead to an increase in cases.
“We're doing everything we can to prevent that with the guidelines we've set forth, with having high capacity for testing and contact tracing,” Dunn continued. “All those things are designed to prevent that surge in cases. But we know we have to balance the policies of what public health recommends with what other experts recommend as well. Because this public health pandemic certainly crosses sectors, and so the governor has to take all those policy recommendations into consideration before setting his ultimate policy.”
The state won’t have a clear picture of how the change will impact COVID spread for another two weeks.
“We have definitely seen and heard reports from others about you know there's some clusters of people not wearing masks, and then you know people visiting state parks maybe even more crowded situations than we would like,” Dunn said. “But that impact of us going from red to orange, we won't really understand the impact on COVID cases for at least another week or two.”
Dr. Dunn says they do not expect a surge of cases and are hopeful to see a drop of cases in the coming weeks.
