Don’t plan a trip to Zion National Park or Lake Powell for Spring Break. Those two areas are the latest victims to COVID-19.
Governor Gary Herbert announced the closure of Zion National Park starting Saturday April 4. In a news conference Friday, he also said the state is working to close boat ramps on Lake Powell.
“Travel should be eliminated unless it's essential,” Herbert said. “If people think somehow that they can well leave their primary residence here on the Wasatch Front and go onto a vacation home or hotel in southern Utah, you're not interpreting our directives correctly. This requires you if you’re on your way down I-15 right now and can hear my voice I’d ask you to turn around and come home. We again need to stay safe by staying home.”
Former Utah National Guard Adjunct General Jefferson Burton has been assigned by the Governor to lead the COVID-19 response at the Utah Department of Health. Burton shared some numbers evaluating Utah’s preparedness for the virus.
Burton says Utah should not need any more ventilators. However, they do need more personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. Burton said they have ordered more face masks, face shields and gowns.
The state is no longer counting visitors and residents separately. State Epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn explains that’s consistent with national reporting.
“We have had 22 visitors that have been in Utah and become COVID-19 positive while in Utah,” Dunn continued. “We treat them just like every other COVID-19 case in terms of identifying all their close contacts and recommending isolation and quarantine. The reason why we decided to remove that from our dashboard is that the metric of hospitalizations is a better metric at this point in the outbreak. Given the extreme limitations on travel and people staying at home it's more indicative of the burden of the outbreak right now in our local health districts.”
On Friday morning, Summit County Health Department Director Rich Bullough indicated that some studies from other countries are suggesting up to 30% false negatives on some tests.
Dr. Dunn says the tests don’t work as well on people who don’t have symptoms.
“We know that the test is very sensitive,” Dunn explained. “Meaning we can trust the result of a test if someone has symptoms. The test is looking for RNA of the virus and so if somebody is symptomatic and we detect that RNA, we as public health and as medical providers trust that test. We don't have specific numbers yet in terms of false negative and false positive rates with asymptomatic people, because there just haven't been that many people tested that are asymptomatic. We do know from other laboratory tests for viruses that the reliability of the test decreases drastically if they don't have symptoms.”
Utah has around 600 Intensive Care Unit beds. Right now, about half of those are being used by non-coronavirus patients. A report from the University of Washington shows at the virus’ peak Utah will need to use 227 ICU beds for Coronavirus patients.
