Omicron rolls through Utah with record numbers

SALT LAKE CITY — It’s been a busy weekend for Utah’s health care workers as we’ve seen record high cases of COVID-19 in recent days. Intermountain Healthcare physicians updated the public on recent trends.

Epidemiologists say 95% of new COVID-19 cases are the omicron variant, which has basically forced Delta out. As far as hospitalizations, there’s been a 10% increase.

Omicron is also affecting staffing at hospitals. 300 or so health care workers have COVID-19, bringing the total to 1000. Dr. Todd Vento, an infectious diseases physician with Intermountain Healthcare, says while that isn’t to the level where they would have to hold off on some surgeries, it has impacted their staffing and moving people around to ensure high priority departments are covered.

Utah reports 24,147 COVID cases, 20 additional deaths over weekend

Vento says the vast majority of people who have severe illness are unvaccinated, which parallels what we’ve seen nationally.

“It’s not rocket science the things that we’ve learned. It’s very transmissible. It’s preventable in terms of the severity of hospitalization, sickness, illness and death and I think that’s the emphasis that people should pay attention to.”

While the early phase of omicron looks different, and it’s not as severe as delta where people aren’t reporting as many respiratory issues, or loss of taste or smell, Vento warns COVID-19 changes and can behave in other ways we haven’t discovered yet. Bottom line, Vento says we can survive this portion of the pandemic much better if we get boosted, mask up and limit gathering.