Phil Bondurant has a new favorite graph. The Summit County Health Director told the Board of Health last week the graph on the department’s website with lines for vaccinated and unvaccinated cases might offer a glimpse at what living with COVID-19 in the community might look like in the future.
The image itself is pretty simple: There are dates along the bottom and a black line — representing cases in unvaccinated people — about midway up. The line spikes in mid-November before plateauing and heading down. Below that line, hovering just above the bottom axis, is a blue line that stays low and doesn’t change much. Those are the numbers for those who are vaccinated against COVID-19.
“The reason this graph has become my favorite, and it will somewhat predict or help dictate what we're going to be doing in the future is because … it's my opinion that the line on the bottom, the blue line, is what COVID will look like in terms of cases, once we get back to the new normal,” Bondurant told the Board of Health. “Now, I know the ‘new normal’ is an overused phrase, it's become somewhat cliché, but this is what endemic illness or disease looks like in our community.”
Bondurant on Monday told KPCW that the traditional way of thinking about the pandemic, relying largely on the number of new cases, might no longer be the right mindset.
He said hospitalizations were “absolutely” the better metric for judging the disease.
Citing the existence of vaccines, antiviral drugs, testing and other measures, Bondurant said all the tools needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are available.
“We are in a position, though, where we need to start looking at how the vaccines have improved our situation and how they improve the outlook on COVID,” Bondurant said. “And, again, begin that phase of stepping into the next part of the response, which is, ‘How do we work on returning to the new normal now that vaccines are available?’”
He said much of the public health strategy earlier in the pandemic centered on buying time until vaccines became available. Now that they are, he suggested officials would look this spring to new ways of managing the disease.
He said the community was in a good position heading into the ski season, though he acknowledged there are lower vaccination rates elsewhere in the state and country. That includes neighboring Wasatch County, home to many of the visitors and workers who come to Summit County each day.
“As a community, as a health department, as a county, we’ve done what we can to prepare ourselves,” he said. “Now it’s up to individuals to assess their own risk and make decisions accordingly.”
In the early days of the pandemic, Summit County was among the first communities in the state to impose strict health measures. Nearly two years later, Bondurant indicated a different approach was coming next year.
“I believe that once we get through this winter, and this season where we've moved indoors, COVID and the COVID conversation will be much different in the spring and early part of summer. And it should be,” he said. “In Summit County, our focus has always been — masking, other orders — we've been very aggressive. We've been very progressive in those types of orders around masking, social distancing, closing businesses. We're not at that point anymore.”
Summit County remains in the high level of the state’s transmission index. According to the county, the risk of testing positive for COVID-19 is 3.5 times higher for unvaccinated county residents than it is for vaccinated ones. The risk of hospitalization is five times higher.
