The Utah statewide Covid-19 face covering requirement will soon be lifted. Very few people walking on the hills surrounding Salt Lake Valley are still wearing masks anyway. It must be the COVID-19 pandemic
is over, right? Wrong!
A quick look at the Salt Lake County Health Department’s COVID-19 data dashboard shows that on any day more than 100 people in the county are hospitalized with COVID-19, and one or two are dying of it every day. Those are real people, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, leaving this world every day solely due to COVID-19.
The data dashboard also shows there is a weekly cycle in the number of new cases. Every Friday or Saturday the number of new COVID-19 cases hits a weekly low, and every Tuesday or Wednesday it hits a weekly high. This is surely due to social distancing misbehavior that is going on every weekend. We wear masks at work and in the grocery store, but when we are free on the weekends to visit and recreate with friends and family, an awful lot of people are ignoring anti-virus measures. So COVID-19 continues to circulate and be a problem.
There’s another interesting detail revealed in the data. Every Tuesday or Wednesday the daily number of new cases hits a peak, then starts a steep, exponential decline. That shows what would happen if we just
continued our workaday program of social distancing, the number of new cases would go into a permanent exponential decline. Then COVID-19 would cease to exist as the problem it is today.
Erwin McPherson, Salt Lake City