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Utah’s rate of new coronavirus cases continued to fall, with 2,183 new diagnoses reported Friday — the smallest increase of any Friday since mid-November.
The Utah Department of Health on Friday reported a seven-day average of 2,702 new positive test results per day — below last week’s rate of nearly 3,000.
But Utah’s death toll from the coronavirus rose to 1,025 Friday, reaching 100 deaths in a single week for the first time since the pandemic began. Nine fatalities were reported since Thursday:
A Salt Lake County man, age 45 to 64.
Two Salt Lake County men, ages 65 to 84.
A Salt Lake County woman, age 65 to 84.
A Salt Lake County woman, older than 85.
A Sevier County man, older than 85.
A Uintah County woman, age 65 to 84.
A Utah County man, age 45 to 64.
A Washington County man, age 65 to 84.
Meanwhile, Utah’s intensive care units reached record-high levels or crowding on Friday, with 92% of all ICU beds occupied statewide, and 96.7% of ICU beds occupied in the state’s larger “referral” hospitals, which care for most of Utah’s seriously-ill coronavirus patients.
Hospital administrators have said those figures don’t account for staffing fluctuations or for rising pressure on specialists and equipment required by coronavirus patients specifically. COVID-19 now accounts for more than 40% of all ICU patients in Utah, up from 20% in late October.
Overall, hospitalizations held steady Friday, with 568 Utah patients concurrently admitted, UDOH reported. In total, 9,269 Utahns have been hospitalized in Utah for COVID-19, with more than 1,300 admitted in the past two weeks.
For the past week, 26% of all tests have come back positive — a rate that indicates a large number of infected people are not being tested, state officials have said.
There were 11,335 new test results reported Friday, below the weeklong average of about 13,300 new tests per day.
Per-capita rates of new cases again were far higher in Sanpete and Wasatch counties than in the rest of the state. In Sanpete County, about 1 in 53 residents had tested positive for the virus in the past two weeks — meaning their cases are considered “active.” That figure rises to 1 in 45 within the towns of the Sanpete Valley.
In Wasatch County, more than 1 in 60 residents were diagnosed with active cases, with rates of more than 1 in 70 in Washington County.
But many more counties include communities with rates at least that high. According to the state’s “small area” data, more than 520,000 Utahns live in neighborhoods and cities where more than 1 in every 70 residents has an active infection. More than 911,000 live in areas where more than 1 in 75 residents has an active infection.
Even as new infections declined in most of the state, they remained high in some counties. Two-week infection rates reached record highs Friday in Millard, San Juan, Emery, Washington, Iron, Beaver, Kane, and Weber counties.
