Dr. Angela Dunn — Utah's voice of science during the pandemic — talks about her new job as Salt Lake County Health director, and why she left her old job

I have interviewed Dr. Angela Dunn several times since first encountering her in February 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But interviewing her last week was different, because she’s in a different job now.

Dunn left her post as Utah’s state epidemiologist in late May, to take over as executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department.

She says the job’s largely the same, in that she collects the best scientific data and makes her best recommendations to elected officials about what to do to protect people from the coronavirus.

The difference, she told me in our interview, is that as the county’s health director, she has the authority to make orders for the sake of public health. She could order schools to make all their students wear face masks — though, thanks to the Utah Legislature’s pandemic “endgame” bill passed in April, the Salt Lake County Council could overturn that order with a majority vote. And in the majority-Republican council, that’s likely to happen.

That would create drama, Dunn said, but it wouldn’t be effective in helping protect kids and their families. So she’s not issuing such an order, and instead — as she said on July 22, in her first remarks to reporters since taking over at Salt Lake County Health — she’s recommending parents to get their children masked. That strategy is what helped kids stay safe last school year, and right now children 11 and younger can’t get a COVID-19 vaccine.

I talked to Dunn the same afternoon that dozens of anti-mask activists filled a county council meeting room, spending two hours repeating things they learned on the internet. I sat in that same meeting room, wearing my KN95 mask the whole time. When Dunn came in to deliver her presentation to the council, she stayed masked, too.

Read my interview with Dunn — in which she talks about the lessons she learned when she was advising state government leaders about the coronavirus — at sltrib.com. (It’s available to subscribers only, so become a subscriber.)

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Here’s what else I’ve been writing about COVID-19 recently:

• The Sundance Film Festival will be back in-person in Utah for 2022 — and if you want to go, you have to get vaccinated against COVID-19, according to festival director Tabitha Jackson.

• Masks are again required for anyone entering a Salt Lake City-operated building, after an order from Mayor Erin Mendenhall.

• A Logan doctor talked about the strain the surge in COVID-19 cases is placing on medical personnel.