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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah health officials were in the process of moving into endemic stages when omicron happened.
"It's really a pandemic within a pandemic," Michelle Hoffman, deputy director and chief medical adviser at the Utah Department of Health, told members of the Social Services Appropriations Subcommittee on Wednesday. "We're seeing record-high cases and positivity — it's highly likely that anyone with symptoms has COVID-19 and that most of the population is going to be exposed."
The latest and more transmissible omicron variant of COVID-19 has kept the health department on its toes, forcing officials to rethink strategies, including limiting testing for the virus, as the state last week told people to assume they're COVID-positive when symptoms exist.
On Wednesday, Utah's lawmakers were told something many of them have been dying to hear — omicron can't really be stopped by people wearing masks, though it can be slowed.
"We are expecting omicron to spread throughout our population in Utah regardless of the measures that we take," Hoffman said. "It is incredibly transmissible. Masks do help to mitigate the spread, whether it will stop the spread, that's just not possible."
Hoffman said the only way out of it, including helping the ongoing strain on hospitals and protecting essential workers in various industries, is getting booster vaccine doses to Utah's population who have been vaccinated.
"Booster doses remain the best path forward out of the pandemic," she said, adding that just 42.6% of Utahns 18 and older have received a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
"With waning immunity from the primary vaccine series, for which most Utahns completed almost 10 months ago, booster doses are really critical in the fight against omicron," Hoffman said. "It remains our top priority to get boosters to all Utahns."
The health department, she told lawmakers, is "pivoting away" from contact-tracing every case to working mainly to identify high-risk interventions and preventing the most severe outcomes. The mortality rate, she said, remains low, but is significantly higher among the immunocompromised, elderly and unvaccinated Utahns.
Fewer people in Utah are dying with omicron, as well as needing intensive care at hospitals, which is a relief, Hoffman said, but because of the sheer number of people impacted by it, systems are still overwhelmed.
Committee Chairman Rep. Jacob Anderegg, R-Lehi, said he's had COVID-19 "three times," and joked that media reports of the pandemic were not accurate. He said numbers providing "the odds" of getting sick or dying aren't helpful, as he wants proof that vaccination is helping to save lives.
Committee members interrupted Hoffman several times to ask her whether people are dying "with COVID or from COVID" after being checked into the hospital for other reasons, which the state health department has previously addressed. Hoffman said the department conducts "rigorous evaluations" to conclude that reported deaths are "due to COVID-19."
Since booster doses became available, the health department reports there have been 1,574 deaths among people who were unvaccinated and 405 people who experienced breakthrough cases, having been fully vaccinated when it was confirmed they had COVID-19.
Hoffman said officials believe the current omicron surge will be "short-lived" but should be dealt with differently than previous variants of COVID-19, as omicron "is acting very differently."
"It's really time to plan ... to support essential services ongoing," she said.
Members of the Utah House on Wednesday delayed voting on a resolution to overturn existing mask mandates in Salt Lake and Summit counties. The Senate passed the measure on Tuesday.
