BOISE, Idaho — With the new daily cases of the coronavirus climbing again, local health officials are particularly concerned about the impact on younger age groups, and how this could impact in-person learning.
Central District Health oversees four counties – Ada, Boise, Elmore and Valley. And in each of them they're seeing a rise in COVID cases.
“We've seen a consistent trend where all our jurisdictions and all four of the counties are seeing an uptick in cases, and what that means is that our average daily case rate is going up," said CDH public information specialist Brandon Atkins.
The numbers are moving in the wrong direction and now health officials say schools in all four counties could potentially face movement in their categories.
Right now, Ada and Elmore counties are in yellow category. Boise and Valley counties are in the green category.
“So you look at Ada and Elmore counties, for example, and we have an average of 20 daily case rate per 100,000 over a two-week case rate estimation, and if we are evaluating those at the end of this week and we continue to see that trajectory climbing, we may see some changes in the designations of those categories," Atkins said.
Atkins says people 19 to 25 years old are fueling the increase, but it's a community-wide effort and Idahoans have been letting their guards down.
“It's clearly a slap in the face, of known practices that can reduce it," Atkins said, "to have people that say they won't or are unwilling to do those types of things, then we are going to have a hard time getting our communities to low enough levels that we won't be able to have any kind of normalcy until that happens.”
Within the next three or four days, Central District Health will re-evaluate the two-week average. That's when they'll make their category recommendations for schools.
“We just must get the numbers within our community down so that it's not an increased risk every time our students go to school," Atkins said. “We know that in-person learning is certainly the method that all of us want to see happen, we just don't have a case rate right now in our community that is congruent with having that open to just occur as normal."
Atkins said CDH will make their recommendations on Monday.
He also noted the importance of getting a flu shot right now to avoid a potential clash of getting two respiratory illnesses at once.
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