Another 339 Utahns have COVID-19, the lowest daily count in six weeks.

Editor’s Note: The Salt Lake Tribune provides free access to critical stories about the coronavirus. Enroll in our main newsletter, sent to your inbox every morning. To support journalism like this, please donate or become a subscriber.

Utah reported its lowest daily count of new coronavirus cases, 339, in six weeks, as the number of tests that were completed also decreased, the Utah Department of Health reported Wednesday.

Six other Utahns have died from the disease, bringing the state’s death toll to 292.

Wednesday’s case count of 339 is the lowest for the state since June 16, 43 days earlier. Utah’s seven-day moving average for daily cases was lowered to 516.

That is approaching the goal that Governor Gary Herbert set on July 9 to obtain the seven-day average, the measure used by public health officials to monitor trends, below 500 by August 1, which it’s on Saturday.

A week ago, the seven-day moving average was 669 cases per day. That is a 22.9% drop.

Over the past seven days, the state has processed an average of 5,255 tests per day. That’s 25.8% lower than the average daily number of tests – 7,046 – for the previous seven days.

Four of the new deaths occurred in Salt Lake County. One was a man over the age of 85, who had lived in a long-term care facility. Two were women, ages 65 to 84, who also lived in long-term care facilities. The Salt Lake County fourth was a man, also between the ages of 65 and 84, who was not hospitalized when he died.

Salt Lake County accounts for 166 of the state’s COVID-19 deaths, or just under 57%. The county, the most populous in the state, contains just over a third of Utah’s population.

The other two deaths were a Utah county man, aged 45 to 64, who was in a long-term care facility, and a Weber county man, aged 65 to 84, who was hospitalized when died.

For about a month, Utah has seen big changes in its daily numbers; On Tuesday, UDOH spokesman Tom Hudachko said “a couple of casualties can definitely be attributed to the two holiday weekends” in July.

Fluctuating case numbers can also be linked to fluctuations in evidence, Hudachko said. Between Thursday and Friday, for example, the number of reported test results increased from 4,020 to 8,649. On Wednesday, the state reported that 3,682 other people had been tested for COVID-19.

The seven-day moving average for the percentage of positive laboratory tests was 9.6% on Wednesday, UDOH reported.

There were 208 people hospitalized in Utah with COVID-19 as of Tuesday, the UDOH reported. Hospitalization numbers lag behind cases per day.

Since the pandemic began, 39,194 people have contracted COVID-19. According to the UDOH, 26,643 of them are considered “recovered,” defined by health officials as survivors three weeks after diagnosis. A total of 518,191 Utahns have been tested since the pandemic began.

COVID-19’s Utah per capita death rate is just a fraction of the country’s death rate, a difference explained in part by the state’s relatively younger population, a demographic research paper released Wednesday by the University of Utah.

As of July 14, Utah had a per capita rate of seven COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people in the state, wrote Mike Hollingshaus, lead demographer at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, at the David Eccles School of U . of business.

Compare that to the US per capita rate of 41.3 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000.

Hollingshaus wrote that only about a quarter of that difference can be explained by the fact that the average age in Utah is 31.3 years, while the national average age is 38.4 years.

As a “thought experiment,” Hollingshaus calculated that if Utah’s average age were the same as the national average, Utah’s death rate would be 10.1 people dying of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents.

On the other hand, if the US median age were at the Utah level, the national per capita death rate for COVID-19 would drop to 28.3 deaths per 100,000, an improvement but four times the rate of Utah.

So what else explains the difference? Hollingshaus listed a number of possible reasons, some good and some bad. He cited technical factors such as measurement error and the delay times states have in reporting case numbers.

Furthermore, systemic inequalities, such as how racial and ethnic minorities tend to suffer disproportionately from COVID-19, are not distributed equally, so some states address those inequalities more than others.

One interpretation of the data is that Utah is among those states that may have public policies that provide better prevention, response, and treatment of the disease. That’s a reading “often preferred by states that perform well in rankings,” Hollingshaus noted.

Hollingshaus warned against complacency. “These numbers are continually growing, and if we are not careful,” he wrote, “Utah could teeter on the cusp of a death wave that eventually rivals or even exceeds the patterns seen for the United States.”