COVID on decline

The COVID situation at the Coeur d’Alene School District has improved vastly in the past couple of weeks.

On Tuesday, the district was down to five staff absences related to COVID-19.

Previously experiencing over 100 staff absent per day for various reasons during the first week of February, district spokesman Scott Maben said the current low number is a relief.

“We hope this trend continues through the end of the school year,” Maben said.

On Jan. 14, the district had reported the possibility of temporary closures of school buildings due to staff absences from COVID-19 and other illness.

Maben said the surge from the latest variant has continued to decline as quickly as it appeared and they are no longer managing a crisis in staffing the schools. Woodland Middle School was the only school to move to temporary remote learning for Jan. 21 and 24.

COVID cases in the district went down to 52 cases last week, almost a quarter of the amount of cases reported the last week of January.

Last week, North Idaho College reported a total of nine students and six employees self-reported as positive for the virus. NIC had 74 reported students and employees in quarantine when they moved to partial remote learning for a two-week period from Jan. 24 to Feb. 4, returning back to in-person classes on Feb. 7.

The plan was to minimize the overall foot traffic on campus to reduce the spread of illnesses, following the rise of COVID cases putting a strain on the college community, said Laura Rumpler, NIC’s chief communications officer.

Upon returning to normal operations, NIC had a total of 21 students and employees in quarantine and has remained close to that level since.

Alex Harris, interim dean of students and the COVID-19 response director, said information from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and the Panhandle Health District preliminarily indicated that the state reached its peak of infections and began a decline while the school was in partial remote learning.

“We feel like we accomplished the goal of limiting negative educational impacts on students, while maintaining a high level of continuity of operations and keeping our employees and students safe,” Harris said.

NIC has a total of 351 student cases and 159 employee cases self-reported since Aug. 15.

Dena Naccarato, superintendent for Post Falls School District, said Tuesday that the district experienced a surge in COVID cases about three weeks ago.

“At that time we had over 40 cases in a week,” Naccarato wrote in an email. “Since then we have seen a noticeable decline to under 10 cases per week.”

The district is “fortunate to have kept all our schools open, thus far this year,” Naccarato said.

Local school districts have not had mask mandates this school year. Dr. Christine Hahn, state epidemiologist, said school districts around the state that do have mask mandates are dropping them or about to do so.

She said she understood that many parents and students are "eager to have the mask mandates go away," but it may be too early.

"We are worried there is still a lot of disease out there," she said. We don’t want to see cases spike again."

Statewide and locally, COVID hospitalizations are down.

Kootenai Health reported it had 72 COVID-19 inpatients on Tuesday, with 17 in critical care. In early October, it reached a high of 150 COVID-19 patients, with 43 in critical care.

According to the state's COVID-19 Dashboard, there were 431 people hospitalized in Idaho due to COVID-19 on Saturday. On Jan. 30, that number was 614 and it reached a high of 793 on Sept. 24.

In another positive sign, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare on Tuesday deactivated crisis standards of care in the three public health districts in southern Idaho.

State health officials said CSC was deactivated in Southwest District Health, Central District Health, and South Central District Health because shortages in staffing and blood products have stabilized.

DHW Director Dave Jeppesen said, "We are not out of the woods yet."

“Even though things are improving, the number of COVID-19 cases statewide and the testing percent positivity is still very high,” Jeppesen said.

The state reported 2,177 new cases on Tuesday, while PHD reported 150.

As usual, Jeppesen urged people to get vaccinated, boosted and wear a mask in public places.

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Staff writers Elli Goldman Hilbert and Bill Buley contributed to this report.