Park Record file photo
Summit County Manager Tom Fisher, who is also a brigadier general in the Utah National Guard, paused during one of the more unusual meetings he’d convened in his time in the top post of the county’s government.
It was March 14, 2020.
Looking around the conference room, Fisher saw top officials from Summit County and Park City, elected officials and department heads in the same room working on the same problem.
In an interview nearly a year later recalling the early days of the pandemic that has changed so many aspects of daily life, Fisher drew on his military experience to describe his thinking at that moment.
The first signs of a post-Thanksgiving surge of COVID-19 cases started to appear six days after the holiday, Summit County Health Director Rich Bullough said, a grim development that officials hope is not indicative of a winterlong trend.
“We are where we expected to be,” Bullough said in an interview Tuesday morning. “Went into Thanksgiving with numbers higher than we wanted to be, and we’re seeing the surge we expected.”
He told the Board of Health on Monday that the case rate is rising quickly among older populations. He said that it appeared that intergenerational gatherings contributed to that trend, though his teams hadn’t had time to analyze the data.