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Another 369 Utahs have tested positive for COVID-19, while two more have died from the disease, the Utah Department of Health said Saturday in its daily report.
The new deaths are the total death toll from the state to 385 people.
Both of the people who died lived in Salt Lake County and were residents in a long-term care facility. One was a woman over 85, according to the Department of Health, and the other was a man between 65 and 84 years old.
The biggest fear among Utah’s medical leaders has been that an outbreak would result in hospitals being overcrowded with coronavirus patients, and that intensive care units would run out of beds. When the outbreak is slower, hitting a new lower plateau, the number of people with coronavirus in those ICUs continues to decline.
On Saturday, the Department of Health reported 56 ICU patients with COVID-19. That’s two lower than Friday and the lowest total the state has reported since this information was first made public in June.
The Utah ICUs cared for coronavirus patients on July 19 on July 19, around the time hospital administrators and public health officials sounded the alarm that if this state did not take more precautionary measures, hospitals could have the space to treat people.
The state added seven more cases to its number of school outbreaks for a total of 73 infections. Those infections come from 13 outbreaks, a number that did not increase on Saturday. The state also reported five hospitalizations of those infections, while they previously reported a more generic less than five hospitalizations.
The state’s role seven days on average for new cases – the metric public health officials use to measure trends – stands at 354 cases per day. The weekly average remains below the governor’s goal of less than 400 cases per day.
The number of people who tested positive also dropped slightly from the last two days, when health officials reported that more than 400 people tested positive every day.
Since the pandemic began, 48,814 Utahs have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the health department reported.
Another 2,966 tests for the virus were processed in the past 24 hours, it said, bringing the total number of tests performed to 622,363.
The rolling average of seven days for percentage of positive laboratory tests is now 8.7% That is still about three times the 3% level that public health officials often say is needed to see that the spread of the virus is contained
The health department also reported that 40,352 Utahns are considered recovering from COVID-19, which they define as surviving at least three weeks after being diagnosed.
