COVID-19 county stories: Daggett and Wayne stay coronavirus-free; early data favors masks

SALT LAKE CITY — It seems as if it’s impossible to avoid COVID-19 these days, but Daggett and Wayne counties entered this week as Utah's remaining holdouts to this point in the pandemic.

Sounds like paradise, right?

There’s really no method to how it’s happened, but population probably helps. Daggett County, located in northeastern Utah along the state’s Wyoming and Colorado borders, is Utah’s least-populated county; Wayne County, home to Capitol Reef and Canyonlands national parks in southern Utah, is the fourth-least populated county.

KSL.com reached out to Liberty Best, TriCounty Health Department spokesperson, as to how Daggett County has avoided COVID-19 to this point. It’s not just population but how that population is spread out, she wrote in an email.

“Daggett County not only has a small population but also is a little more rural than the rest of the TriCounty area, which may be a factor,” Best wrote.

That’s not to say the coronavirus has escaped the TriCounty Health Department’s jurisdiction entirely. Through Tuesday data, the department has 109 total cases since the pandemic began. It’s the second-fewest number of cases among any Utah county, but the area has also doubled its number of cases since July began.

The Utah Department of Health lumps Daggett and Uintah counties together in its public data, but all 62 cases reported in that section are in Uintah County.

Entering Tuesday, there were also four other counties with fewer than 20 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began; they are Beaver, Rich, Piute and Emery counties, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This shouldn't be too surprising; all six counties with fewer than 20 cases are among the state’s 10 least-populated counties.

Conversely, the six counties with the most cases go in order with the six highest-populated counties: Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber, Washington and Cache counties.

Promising early data for masks in Utah

It’s been nearly a full month since Salt Lake and Summit counties ordered face coverings to be worn in public places, and the early numbers have yielded promising results.

We looked at three key dates for this article using Utah Department of Health, Salt Lake County Health Department and Summit County Health Department data.

It’s worth noting some integers are a bit off because the county may report a new case faster than the state. We also took into account that Dr. Angela Dunn, the state’s epidemiologist, said that it takes about two weeks after a mandate before any results can be calculated.

The key dates we looked at were June 27 (the day of the mandate), July 10 (the 14th day after the mask order went into order) and the date of this story's publication, which happens to be Tuesday. It should also be noted that there are delays in reporting, so technically this would be data through Monday.

So what does the data tell us?

We first looked at the running average of new Salt Lake and Summit county cases compared to state data subtracting those two counties. Heading into July, Salt Lake and Summit counties accounted for about half of Utah's new cases. In fact, their combined number of cases began to exceed that of the other 27 counties combined for a few days at the beginning of the month.

Things changed after July 4. While both Salt Lake and Summit county, and the rest of the state, experienced COVID-19 increases, the Salt Lake/Summit increases were less sharp and declined after July 12, while the number of cases in the rest of the state continued upward. On July 12, Salt Lake/Summit posted a running average of 314.7 cases while the rest of the state reached 352.9 new cases. A little more than a week later, on Monday, Salt Lake/Summit fell to a running average of 260 new cases, compared to 351.7 from the rest of the state.

Here’s another way to look at it: On June 27, Salt Lake and Summit counties accounted for about 53% of all COVID-19 cases from March through the state’s COVID-19 report issued that day. The two counties accounted for 48% of Utah’s COVID-19 cases from June 27 through July 10; from July 11 through Monday’s report, it accounted for 43% of the state’s cases.

The two counties currently account for 50.2% of all cases to date. Salt Lake County, at 171 new cases on Monday, also reported its lowest one-day increase since June 22.

It's important to note that this data is still early; in addition, mask and no-mask data will likely never be a perfect science as it currently stands. For example, Salt Lake County could gain cases from people contracting COVID-19 at home, in situations where they chose to be around others not wearing masks, in the county or even from going outside the county. And many retail businesses and grocery stores — like Walmart, Target, Harmons and Smith’s — have mandated face coverings at their businesses, regardless if that county has a mandate or not.

All of these variables can muddy the data a little. But any way you look at it, declining numbers are a positive sign.

Grand County and the city of Springdale (in Washington County) have since joined Salt Lake and Summit counties with mandating masks. But it's a little bit too early to compare the data for those two areas, as both areas reached the two-week mark from their mask policies going into place on Friday.

Where is COVID-19 rising now?

So, if Salt Lake and Summit counties are seeing slowdowns in cases, then what is propelling the state’s generally high numbers in daily counts? In a Coronavirus Mailbag published on June 25, we answered that six of Utah’s 13 health departments accounted for roughly 94% of Utah’s cases from Memorial Day to June 25.

It seems fitting to look at the rise in cases from June 25 to now. Even though its case numbers have slowed down in rate, Salt Lake County still has the most overall cases in that time period — but its growth rate ranks fifth-lowest among the 13 local health departments in the state since June 25.

With our defined timespan, no health department in the state has experienced growth rates below 25%. The Wasatch County Health Department leads the way with a 25% increase. Weber-Morgan Health Department has experienced the largest spike, percentage-wise, with the two-county department reporting a 161% increase in COVID-19 cases in a little less than a month.

Here’s a look at percentage increase with all of Utah's 13 health departments ranked in order from lowest to highest case growth rate, from June 25 through Tuesday:

• Wasatch County Health Department: 25% increase to 495 total cases (99 new cases)
• Summit County Health Department: 34% increase to 643 total cases (164 new cases)
• Bear River Health Department (Box Elder, Cache and Rich counties): 38% increase to 1,945 total cases (535 new cases)
• San Juan County Public Health: 38% increase to 545 total cases (149 new cases)
• Salt Lake County Health Department: 67% increase to 16,871 total (6,741 new cases)
• Utah County Health Department: 77% increase to 6,516 new cases (2,843 new cases)
• Southeast Utah Health Department (Carbon, Emery and Grand counties): 91% increase to 63 total cases (30 new cases)
• Southwest Utah Public Health Department (Beaver, Garfield, Iron, Kane and Washington counties): 93% to 2,526 total cases (1,219 new cases)
• Tooele County Health Department: 103% increase to 443 total cases (225 new cases)
• Davis County Health Department: 132% increase to 2,415 total cases (1,374 new cases)
• Central Utah Public Utah (Juab, Millard, Piute, Sanpete, Sevier and Wayne counties): 138% increase to 309 total cases (179 new cases)
• TriCounty Health Department (Daggett, Duchesne and Uintah counties): 156% to 115 total cases (70 new cases)
• Weber-Morgan Health Department (Morgan and Weber counties): 161% increase to 2,112 total cases (1,304 new cases)

The increases mostly show that areas that weren't really hit much over the first few months of the pandemic are starting to experience it now, especially the Weber-Morgan Health Department. That area didn't hit 1,000 total cases until June 29 — about 115 days after Utah began reporting cases. It reached its second thousand less than three weeks later, on Friday.

Remote areas like TriCounty and Central health departments have doubled their cases in the last month. The Southeast Utah Health Department has nearly doubled as well — even though the total number of positive tests in all three districts remains very low when compared to the state's total number of cases. It still goes to show that COVID-19 can spread to anywhere.

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