The Summit County Board of Health, meeting Monday, heard some discouraging news from their Health Director.
Rich Bullough reported that they’ve seen a surge in cases of COVID-19, showing that the increase state-wide has caught up with Summit County.
Bullough said the increase is being driven by the younger population.
Bullough told the Health Board that their tally of Covid cases took a significant jump over the weekend, with 20 on Saturday and 18 on Sunday. That raised the county’s total cases to 1070.
“Since this pandemic hit Summit County in March, we’ve only had 10 days where we’ve hit—a total of 10 days where we’ve hit 20 cases in a day. We did that again on Saturday. As you know, the state has been surging. Counties around us have been surging. And now again, we are surging.”
The county’s total for hospitalizations is up to 58 with two of those now active. It has recorded one death.
Bullough said the Utah Medical Association recently stated that it is extraordinarily concerned. The group is asking citizens to be very diligent as Utah enters the fall and winter.
The county issued a Mandatory Mask Order in late June, and Bullough said residents have generally been good about following that directive. But there’s one other precaution they are forgetting.
“We need to get back to the idea of social distancing. It’s incredibly important. We appear, at least observationally, I’m seeing great compliance with mask-wearing, but lessening compliance with social distancing—large number of groups in close proximity to each other. Even in retail outlets and other places where people are gathering, I’m not seeing the social distancing like I observed months ago.”
Citing another measurement, Bullough said the number of active cases is significantly climbing day over day. The “active” number represents their total Covid cases, minus those that have recovered.
Bullough said that state-wide, the increases have been driven by the younger population.
“What’s happened is the young people who-there’s no other way to say it—they’ve been irresponsible, thinking that somehow this isn’t important. And indeed, they sometimes don’t get real sick. They have now infected demographics that are at higher risk. The disease has incubated. We’re now far enough along that continuum that they are sick and they are being hospitalized.”
Summit County Nurse Carolyn Rose said that over the past week, a couple of different factors have driven the increase.
“A lot of them seem to be last week were coming from the school sports teams and then, being in classes. Then, over the weekend, to be honest I’m not totally sure where they were coming from. But now we’re seeing multiple names in the same family. So I think it’s going both ways. The kids are giving it to the parents. And then sometimes the parents are sick first, and give it to the kids.”
Bullough said, again, that most of the cases are on the west side of the county, but there are also increases in South Summit.
He added that the school districts have been working very hard to deal with the pandemic. Bullough’s numbers showed seven cases associated with the Park City District, and under five each for South Summit, North Summit and private schools.
“There’s a continuing rumour up here that somehow, districts are minimizing the number of cases for one reason or another. I want to share with the public, we are not seeing that. In fact, they’re being, I believe, probably more aggressive and more real-time in reporting numbers than we are able to be.”
Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough.
