Summit County officials are talking about starting some kind of reopening on May 1st —but done gradually and carefully, while watching the medical data on COVID-19.
At the same time, they’re warning that when we return to “normal”, it may not exacty be like the old ‘normal.” And recovery isn’t going to happen quickly.
At Wednesday’s meeting of the Summit County Council, Deputy County Manager Janna Young said that under Governor Gary Herbert’s color-coded system, the county is hoping to move from “Red”, the current urgent response, to “Orange” which would be Stabilization.
She said that “Green” would be the final stage.
“Green is being called the New Normal. It certainly isn’t going to be life as we knew it before this pandemic, but The New Normal. And that is the least restrictive level. Most likely we won’t see that level until there’s herd immunity. And herd immunity is when 90 percent of the population have either had a combination, has either had the virus and is now immune to it. And then the other half or percentage is vaccinated.”
Council Member Roger Armstrong said that even locally, there’s a debate among citizens about how fast to reopen. He said that on both sides, people are dealing with some difficult emotions.
“Based on what I’ve heard from people in the community, there’s an equal divide and an equal amount of fear about what happens to us economically if we don’t get back on track. We have people with food insecurity, housing insecurity concerns. And on the other side, we’ve got people that are actually quite frightened about moving too fast and opening up too much.”
Meanwhile, Council Member Glenn Wright told KPCW that they’ve made progress in monitoring the situation. He said they conducted over 2400 tests in the past week. There were 1100 tests done on Wednesday just at the Ecker Hill park n ride.
In this round of tests, Wright said only two to three percent were positive. That compares to the state average of 5 percent. And Summit County was showing 20 to 30 percent positives a short time ago.
He said the numbers show that social distancing and the other recommended precautions are working. He commended the citizens and urged them to keep it up next month.
“And we will do some opening next month. But I think the entire population has to be wary—do it carefully, don’t push the limits. Keep maintaining your social distance. And if we all do that, I think we’ll have a successful slow opening to the county. If we don’t, we could be back where we were a few weeks ago.”
Finally, Janna Young told the Council Wednesday that they could be feeling the impacts of the coronavirus outbreak for a long time.
“And I think everyone needs to face the expectation that for several years forward, there’s going to be some form of social distancing and sanitization occurring within our community. This is just, sort of, where we are right now with the virus. And until there’s a vaccination or a treatment, we’ll have to continue with many portions of those restrictions.”
Deputy Summit County Manager Janna Young.
