Utah Reports Fewer than 200 New COVID-19 Cases and One More Death

More than 565,000 Utahns have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

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After a typically slow Sunday, the Utah Department of Health reported 173 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday. Only 3,778 tests were administered.

That’s the lowest number of new cases since there were 163 on March 21, another Sunday.

More than 565,000 Utahns have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, roughly 17 percent of the state’s population. And there was one more death attributed to COVID-19.

Vaccine dose administered in the previous day / total doses administered • 2,326 / 1,498,039.

Fully vaccinated Utahns • 565,539.

Cases reported the day before • 173.

Deaths reported the day before • One: a Utah County woman between the ages of 65 and 84.

Tests reported the day before • 2,111 people were tested for the first time. A total of 3,778 people were evaluated.

Hospitalizations reported the day before • 121. That’s eight since Sunday. Of those currently hospitalized, 47 are in intensive care units, two more than on Sunday.

Percentage of positive tests • Under the state’s original method, the rate is 8.2%. That’s higher than the seven-day average of 7.1%.

The state’s new method counts all test results, including repeated tests on the same individual. Monday’s rate was 4.65%, higher than the seven-day average of 3.5%.

[Read more: Utah is changing how it measures the rate of positive COVID-19 tests. Here’s what that means.]

Totals to date • 387,514 cases; 2,133 deaths; 15,625 hospitalizations; 2,413,193 people tested.

On Monday, an artist from Utah unveiled her “thank you” to frontline healthcare workers who have battled COVID-19, a large painting that she donated to Intermountain Healthcare.

Heather Olsen, a Riverton artist, said her painting, titled “Together We Can Do This,” was the result of meeting doctors and nurses and admiring their life-saving sacrifices during the pandemic.

“They really are heroes,” Olsen told healthcare workers at an opening Monday at the Intermountain Transformation Center in Murray. “Every day you are changing lives and making a difference. You’re making the world a better place. “

The painting, a collage of 11 doctors and nurses in action, “is what I can do to say ‘Thank you,'” Olsen said. “It has been huge for me, almost healing in some way. [It] I was comforted to know that these people are out there and doing everything they can. “

Prints of the painting will be distributed to Intermountain hospitals and facilities. And healthcare workers will have the opportunity to get personal impressions.

Olsen, inspired by her sister, who is a nurse, began painting pictures of healthcare workers about a year ago, when the pandemic began. The first showed a nurse, wrapped in personal protective equipment, putting on gloves. (That painting was part of a collection of coronavirus-inspired works by Utah artists, curated by The Salt Lake Tribune in April 2020.)

[Read more: How 21 Utah artists created images inspired by the coronavirus]

Although he gave the figure in that painting, and others in later paintings, a generic face, Olsen said, “Several nurses came up to me and said, ‘You did it to me.”

Elizabeth Hyde, an intensive care unit nurse at Intermountain, received one of those paintings from Olsen, who delivered it to her home at a time when Hyde said she was “exhausted, physically and emotionally.”

“When he showed up on my doorstep,” Hyde said, “it gave me that push and the assurance that I’m a good nurse, that I can do this, and I can benefit the community with what I do every day.”