MURRAY – The current rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are a sign of a surge in the holiday, said Dr. Eddie Stenehjem, infectious diseases physician at Intermountain Healthcare.
How bad the weather gets depends on what Utahns does to stop the spread.
“We expect January to be pretty tough from a hospital admission point of view,” said Stenehjem.
As the number of cases of COVID-19 increases, he said, there is usually a seven to 10 day delay before the number of hospital admissions increases, which is happening now.
The Utah Department of Health estimated there were 53,597 active cases of COVID-19 in the state Thursday. The seven-day moving average number of positive cases per day was 2,952, while the progressive positive test rate per day had increased to 32.7%.
“This is without a doubt a wave of, I would say, the holidays, starting from December 24 through New Years,” said Stenehjem.
The number of cases, the positivity rate and now the number of hospital admissions are increasing again after a dip in mid-December.
Here we go … post-holiday hike. https://t.co/8TgvlSyXcR
– Eddie Stenehjem (@E_Stenehjem) January 7, 2021
“We are now starting to see this in hospital admissions, both on the state data and on Intermountain’s internal data,” he said.
Stenehjem said this is the holiday wave they expected. “If you look at the trend line, it goes up again,” he said.
Patients in the hospital tell doctors how they think they contracted the virus.
“Yes, I had a holiday gathering … A few days later someone got sick,” said Stenehjem.
They hoped hospital admissions would drop further in December to make way for patients during this wave, but it didn’t. The hospital is again above the 85% limit, the functional capacity of the hospital.
“Unfortunately, we expect this rise to continue and we will see more and more cases that will lead to more hospitalizations and, as we know, ultimately lead to more deaths,” said Stenehjem.
How long the wave lasts depends on how much the virus has spread in the past week and how quickly everyone is returning to social distance practices and restrictive gatherings.
“If people return to that, we expect those numbers to drop again,” said Stenehjem.
With so many positive cases, the doctor said more people should be tested so they can better understand what’s going on with the virus.
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Jed Boal