The last regular COVID-19 media briefing

During its March 15 COVID-19 media briefing, in an action that spoke much louder than words, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) announced that the briefing would be the last of its regularly scheduled media events for the discussion issues related to the pandemic.

Up until February, IDHW held a media briefing every Tuesday afternoon. The IDHW-hosted online media briefings began on Jan. 5, 2021. They were held weekly until at the end of February 2022, when IDHW switched to an every-other-week schedule. Before the weekly briefings started, IDHW were regular participants in Governor Brad Little’s COVID-19 press conferences.

During the briefing on March 15, IDHW Administrator of Public Health Elke Shaw-Tulloch announced: “I am pleased (Idaho’s) COVID-19 indicators continue to head in the right direction. Our cases continue to decline.”

Remember positivity?

The target that epidemiologists want to see is a testing positivity rate below 5%, meaning that only 1 in 20 tests for a disease is a positive result. The most recent Omicron variant of COVID-19 had a peak of positivity of 37.9% in the period from Jan. 16 to Jan. 22. For the period of Feb. 20 through Feb. 26, the state’s positivity rate dropped to 6.2%.

Shaw-Tulloch added to her announcement that: “We are meeting our goal of being below a testing positivity rate of 5%. In fact, we are at 3.7% statewide.”

Shaw-Tulloch also announced that due to the changes introduced by declining cases, effective vaccines and increasing ICU bed capacity across the state, IDHW will be introducing changes this week to the state’s COVID-19 website to adjust for the availability of home-administered COVID-19 antigen tests.