The state of Utah is currently under a gubernatorial “directive” – rather than a mandatory order – to stay at home, and all schools and universities have closed their physical facilities to students, while restaurants are limited to carry-out and drive-by food service, and non-essential businesses are supposed to be closed. But the mayors of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have issued mandatory stay-at-home orders, as has Summit County (essentially Park City).

In our part of the state, what’s an essential business seems rather loosely defined. Gun shops are open, as are dollar stores and at least one or two furniture emporiums, and a significant percentage of university faculty are still using their offices daily. I don’t see large groups in public places, but there’s a feeling that I can only call surreal, because it seems to me that, with the exception of the lack of toilet paper, flour, and pasta in the grocery stores, most people here are acting as if nothing really bad is going to happen.

Maybe, in a state with a great deal of open space, matters won’t get as bad as in New York and all the larger cities – except that the Wasatch Front, a hundred miles of suburban and urban sprawl sandwiched between two mountain ranges containing two million people, doesn’t exactly qualify as open space, as the two Salt Lake area mayors seem to realize, unlike the suburban municipalities surrounding Salt Lake. With a 1,000 known cases and only seven deaths in Utah at the moment, matters don’t seem that bad. Except, only 20,000 people have been tested.

Cedar City and its principal suburb contain roughly 45,000 people, plus whatever college students are remaining here out of 11,000, but St. George, 50 miles south, contains over 150,000 people, and I have my doubts that this part of Utah will remain unscathed, although at present there have only been less than 50 known cases and two covid-19 deaths in the two counties. The first testing locations became available in this area just today.

One aspect of this that I find troubling is that all too many people here have no idea how bad things are elsewhere, as evidenced by something like fifteen commissioners of rural counties here who wrote the governor demanding that he remove the directive and prohibitions because there was no danger of a pandemic here and those prohibitions were strangling the local economies. Or by the university student who couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t be able to attend a summer program in Berlin. Or some friends who continue to live “normal” lives.

And most people don’t seem to realize that, while we have a very new and modern small hospital, it only has 48 beds… and it’s 250 miles to Salt Lake or 50 miles to St. George, a small city with a population containing large numbers of retirees.

It could be that southwestern Utah will escape relatively unscathed, but I’m not betting on it… especially since too many people here seem to think it won’t happen.