OGDEN — New COVID-19 case counts may soon start trending downward in Weber and Morgan counties, the head of the Weber-Morgan Health Department says.

Brian Cowan, the department director, cited testing of sewage for the presence of the COVID-19 virus at the Central Weber Sewer Improvement District, which serves much of Weber County, as well as trends related to the COVID-19 omicron variant on the East Coast.

“What we’re seeing in the bioload in the sewage is that we may be starting to plateau,” Cowan told Weber County commissioners on Monday during his weekly update to them on COVID-19.

He also noted COVID-19 case trends in the New York and New Jersey area, where the numbers of new cases are starting to fall. If the experience in those places — hit earlier than Utah by the omicron uptick — is any indication, Utah’s numbers may soon start falling as well.

“We’re seeing that it’s about a four, four-and-a-half week timeframe for a lot of areas where they have the rapid omicron growth and then it starts to taper off,” he said.

Locally, the omicron punch started around Dec. 28, he estimated, which means Weber and Morgan counties are approaching the four-week mark since it started to impact the area in earnest. If the trend here parallels that of places like New York and New Jersey, “then maybe we are at or approaching the peak of our omicron infections. I hope so. The last two weeks have been a crazy ride,” Cowan said.

Presuming the Utah experience parallels what’s happened on the East Coast, he said COVID-19 case growth could fall to the pre-omicron levels of early December by the middle of March.

The punch packed by omicron has been notable. When the delta variant hit last fall, Weber and Morgan counties were collectively seeing around 1,200 new COVID-19 cases a week. Over the past two weeks as omicron cases have surged, Weber and Morgan counties experienced 10,775 new cases, nearly 5,400 a week on average.

That said, the omicron variant, though it has landed more people in the hospital, has resulted in fewer people in intensive-care units. Most of those hospitalized because of COVID-19 — 81% of them — have been unvaccinated, he added.

Schools up and down the Wasatch Front have been wrestling with an uptick in cases, moving classes online in some cases to guard against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Ogden School District schools all went online last Friday and Monday. Elementary school students will return to in-person learning on Tuesday.

Ogden and Ben Lomond high schools and the district’s three junior high schools, however, will be online again on Tuesday, district officials announced Monday. They’re worried about lingering case numbers at the schools.

Staying remote for five consecutive days, last Friday through Tuesday, allows the district to reset the school’s COVID-19 case count to zero at the secondary schools, per state guidelines, the district said in a message to parents. That reduces the likelihood the schools need to revert again to online learning in the future.

In-person instruction at the five Ogden schools is to resume on Wednesday.

Numerous Weber School District schools have also moved classes online last week. A handful continue with remote learning, Cowan said, including Roy High School and Roy and Sandridge junior high schools.

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