COVID-19 cases in Utah are spiking. Friday, Utah saw it’s highest number of new cases since the start of the pandemic.
Eddie Stenehjem is an infectious disease expert at Intermountain Healthcare. He said Utah’s current cases are rivaling the spike the state saw in July.
But he said the spike was different earlier this summer. Now, the state’s increase in cases is predominantly driven by a younger age group. Stenehjem said most of the new cases arefrom 15-24 years old.
"That's being driven by high schools and colleges most likely," Stenehjam said. "We expected this it's driven by most likely High School, extracurricular activity, college and social events in that 15 to 24 year old age."
But Stenehjem said the numbers have remained stable in younger kids.
"When you look at the kids one to 14 years old, we have not seen a significant spike in those cases," he said. "So what this is telling us is that those elementary schools and middle schools, yes, there's been outbreaks. Yes, there's been isolated cases. But we're seeing that they're following the protocols that they've set up in the elementary and junior high schools."
He said that younger age groups are generally asymptomatic and rarely go to the hospital, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t transmitting the disease. He said healthcare officials are watching for potential transmission from 15 to 24 year olds to their parents and grandparents.
And right now, hospitalization rates have stayed low. But Stenehjem isn’t optimistic that they will stay that way.
"I would anticipate that if we're going to see an increase in hospitalizations, that is probably going to come in two to three weeks from now, which allows time for transmission, incubation period, symptom onset, gets severe enough ill and then you're coming into hospital" he said. "And what we will probably start to see is an uptick in cases in the older age groups being offset by 10 days or so from those of the 15 to 24 year olds. And so we might start seeing the second wave of Older people getting the infection, which is then going to lead to hospitalizations."
Eventually, he said, Utah’s healthcare system won’t have the capacity to care for all the sick people in the state.
"If we just let this spread a lot of people will get it and a lot of people would do just fine," according to Stenehjem. "That said, there's going to be a lot of really sick people and will very quickly outstrips the capacity in our healthcare system to care for those people with COVID-19 and not allow us to care for people without COVID-19 that need our hospital services that car accidents, the heart attacks, the strokes, the bacterial pneumonias that we care for."
He also said Utahns will face even more risks for transmission when it starts to get cold.
"In the winter, we're moving indoors, and we're moving into close quarters," he said. "We're shutting windows, that ventilation in our classrooms and in our homes is going down. And so it's going to be a bigger risk, especially as cases are going up."
Stenehjem advised that once winter begins it’ll be even more important to social distance, decrease close contacts and improve indoor ventilation.
