SALT LAKE CITY — In a weekly coronavirus briefing, Governor Gary Herbert announced a new scoreboard that will allow people to see how the state is holding up during the pandemic.
State leaders are focusing primarily on economic prosperity and health — the success of both, they said, is intertwined.
On the Unified Response Scoreboard, you’ll find the State’s goals, or targeted numbers.
For COVID-19 fatalities, state leaders hope for below one percent, and for unemployment claims they hope to maintain 4.5-percent or less.
“This is an economic crisis like no other in that it is also a health crisis,” said Taylor Randall, Dean for the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. “To solve the economic crisis we have to be very observant and we also have to solve the health crisis.”
The goal is to reduce unemployment weekly claims to below 50,000. Currently, 54,666 unemployment claims have been filed.
“We’ll be tracking how to connect people directly with jobs in the exchange program,” said Lt. Governor Spencer Cox. “We do have jobs available right now, but sometimes we have a hard time connecting people who need jobs with those jobs that are available.”
Included are goals for using ICU beds — the State wants to keep use below 85-percent to avoid overwhelming hospitals.
Also included is a graph for pending vaccines.
“We’re always looking for a silver bullet that is going to fix all of this,” said Cox. “What we’ve learned over the past several months is that it’s not one single thing. It’s all of these things together.”
All of these goals are to boost the economy to almost pre-pandemic levels by New Years Eve while maintaining personal health.