SALT LAKE CITY — Some good news when it comes to the fight against COVID in Utah, new cases are trending down.
We now have five straight days of declines, and more than 18,000 more people have received a vaccine dose in the past three weeks.
There were nine deaths reported over the weekend, bringing the total to more than 2,500 but hospitalizations are level since Friday, with 160 patients in the ICU and Intermountain Healthcare says doctors are able to keep more high-risk Utahns with COVID out of the hospital with monoclonal antibody therapy.
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The treatment uses lab-made proteins to help the immune system attack COVID.
"They work best very early on in the symptom course when the impact of the virus is at its greatest and have no antibodies to the virus itself on their own," said Dr. Brandon Webb, an infectious diseases physician at Intermountain Healthcare. "These results are very encouraging. they emphasize that these truly are an important tool for treating patients.”
READ: Utah researchers say antibody treatment effective against COVID-19
This treatment was approved by the FDA in December and has been used on about 600 Utahns.
But, doctors say the best way to protect yourself is still getting vaccinated.
