Idaho Gov. Little: ‘We have really flattened the curve’; stay-home order’s future undecided
Idaho Gov. Brad Little said Thursday night on his weekly coronavirus Q&A with Idaho Public Television that the state is making progress in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s not perfect, but we have really flattened the curve,” Little said. “… We believe that the good work that everybody in the state of Idaho is doing is starting to yield dividends, which is less people getting sick, and most importantly fewer people dying.”
Idaho’s curve of new cases peaked April 1-2 with 141 and 205 new cases reported on those days.
Since then, the maximum was 114 on April 3, and the state hasn’t hit 100 since. The state reported 94 new cases Thursday.
Idaho’s death toll jumped to 24 on Thursday with the second straight day of five reported deaths, the two deadliest days Idaho has seen. Some deaths are reported days after they happen, so it’s unclear when those deaths actually occurred or when those patients got sick.
Little’s 21-day stay-home order runs through the end of the day next Wednesday. He said he’ll decide early next week what to do beyond that date, but he does expect some sort of action.
“We will not flip the switch and go back to what it was before,” Little said. “… There’s ample reason for us to maintain some of those best practices in place, and we’ll decide where we are on the scale as we look forward. So I guess what I’m taking out of this is yes, in some way, shape or form, there will be something still in play after that.
“… There will be things in place that we need to have to continue to allow us to flatten the curve.”
He hinted that he might not go as far as Washington state, which has a stay-home order in place through May 4, or the federal government, which extended social distancing guidelines through the end of April.
“Because of our very successful results that we’re seeing now, we’re looking at it from a variety of if this happens, we want to do this,” Little said. “We’ve got enough personal protective equipment. We’ve got enough hospital room. It’s not a comfortable enough margin that we want to get carried away. What you worry about in this is we talk about flattening the curve. You don’t want a second wave afterwards.
“Nobody wants to open the economy up more than I do. So that’s our goal.”
Little and Dave Jeppesen, director of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, said Idaho is in good shape with its hospital capacity, which is one of the critical factors in handling this pandemic.
The availability of health care workers has been more of an issue than infrastructure, Jeppesen said. Idaho has reported 143 infected health care workers, which is more than 10% of the state’s 1,354 cases.
“The hospitals are doing quite well,” Jeppesen said. “… We’ve been very fortunate so far that the capacity of the hospitals has met the need for our coronavirus patients as well. We’re not at a place where we need to move into surge capacity. … They’re able to fairly easily at this point handle the volume of patients that they see.”
Other notes:
▪ Little was asked about appearing in studio once a week for the Q&A during the stay-home order. Jeppesen appeared remotely this week and Little said he will next week.
▪ The state is still about a week away from producing recovered patients data, Jeppesen said. Those numbers will be estimates, he said. “We know the virus takes anywhere up to 21 days before people have recovered,” he said. “And we’re going to use our best science to really estimate how many of those individuals have recovered.” However, the Panhandle Health District in North Idaho began posting “no longer monitored” patients this week (14 out of 45).
▪ The lower number of test results posted this week (525 per day average on weekdays) compared with last week (833), Jeppesen said, is because the state was catching up on a backlog of tests last week and they were returned in bunches. “Obviously, we’d like to have more testing capacity,” he said. “We continue to work on that. But at the moment we don’t have a big backlog, and this is kind of our current, steady state.” While the number of tests has dropped, so has the percentage that are coming back positive. It was 13.7% for a six-day stretch ending Saturday; it’s 9.6% the past five days.
▪ Antibody testing, which can show who has had the virus and is potentially immune for some amount of time, hasn’t arrived in Idaho yet, Jeppesen said. However, he said there’s some “exciting research” in Blaine County related to antibody testing.
This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 8:24 PM.
