With the amount of traffic around town, it seems like a lot of people are ready to get back to a pre-pandemic life.
Nancy Rosing was visiting from the Atlanta area and paused as the Main Street trolley trundled by.
“I love it,” she said of Park City. “It’s changed a little bit since last time we were here, but it’s such a great place.”
She said her group hasn’t been majorly impacted by COVID-19 and its precautions, mostly because they’d planned to stick to outdoor activities.
“It's not really changed our plan,” Rosing said. “I mean, we've changed our habits, but it's not changed our plan to travel.”
Victor Mora and Dana Huebner were also walking on Main Street Wednesday afternoon. They were visiting from Costa Rica, and just as they stopped to answer a few questions, snowflakes started falling on their heads.
Victor said Park City felt like it was getting back to pre-pandemic levels of bustle. Dana said some places felt relatively safe, from a COVID-19 point of view, and some felt less so.
“I take care of myself a lot,” Huebner said. “So yeah, sometimes I don't like to (go to) certain places because it's really busy. But I don't know. I just like trying to forget about it and just enjoy my vacation.”
For Main Street businesses, the tourist traffic has been a boon. Ivonne Timar is the general manager of Flanagan’s on Main.
“Yes, it is busy, and we're loving it,” she said Thursday. “This is what we've been looking for, and I feel like the town is alive again. So definitely, we're busy every single day since last week, it's been nonstop.”
Without government regulations like mask mandates or vaccine requirements in place, business owners are handling COVID-19 precautions differently. Some advertise they require masks while others recommend them or don’t broadcast a stance.
Timar said customers have become more cautious since the pandemic began, and keep more distance from one another. She said the vast majority of her staff is vaccinated — maybe 80% to 85% — and staff members respect equally the groups who come in wearing masks and those who come in without, saying they’re vaccinated.
“We have hand sanitizer everywhere, like I said, and (we're) disinfecting tables as we go, disinfecting salt-and-peppers. I mean, everything,” Timar said. “So I feel like we got it going. I mean, we know now what it is. And we can target it and we are very much on top of it.”
Such is life operating a business during a pandemic, even if she said it feels like things are getting “back to normal.”
A few miles east of Main Street, Dr. Wing Province works as Park City Hospital’s medical director.
He said the hospital is seeing a steady, high number of COVID-19 cases, but he wouldn’t characterize it as a spike. The vast majority of those COVID-19 patients have not been vaccinated.
As of Tuesday, Province said there hadn’t been any cases of COVID-19 at Park City Hospital caused by the omicron variant of the virus. But he said it was likely a matter of time before that changed.
“We are worried about transmission. As what we're seeing has happened in Europe and the UK and now in New York City and in other places, it looks like the doubling rate for this variant is about two or three days. And within a week or two, in New York, it's already become the dominant variant,” Province said. “So there's certainly a potential for that here if people don't take the right precautions as the holidays come.”
Province said initial reports likely underestimated the seriousness of the disease caused by the omicron variant. He said those results were likely colored by the fact that the omicron variant first hit highly vaccinated populations.
Now, he said, protection against the omicron variant requires three exposures: two vaccines and a booster, or two vaccines and a previous infection.
He shared stories of people, mostly unvaccinated, some young, who suffer lingering symptoms of COVID-19. Some can no longer be as active as they once were, or go skiing, or play sports. Some are afraid to walk from their bed to the bathroom for fear of losing their breath.
"Just story after story about, whether it takes away their life, or it impacts their quality of life. I wish we could get people the accurate information so that they can make decisions that will protect themselves and their loved ones,” he said.
Province said there would be a future when COVID-19 was endemic in the community, similar to the flu. That will take a critical mass of people to be vaccinated so the disease can no longer mutate as easily.
Until then, he advised people to wear masks when in indoor spaces, not to interact with others if sick and to get a vaccine and booster shot. He acknowledged that hearing the same advice for nearly two years might cause people to roll their eyes, but he asked people to put others’ needs before their own.
“One of the more heartbreaking phrases that I've heard over the past few months is ‘back during the pandemic,’” Province said. “And I think what people are referring to is 'during the lockdown of 2020,' but the mindset that the pandemic is over and that we can move forward with a normal life, I don't think we're quite there yet.”