Idaho public health officials say they’re so busy with Covid cases that they’re changing their contact tracing protocols.
On Friday, the Panhandle Health District reported a whopping 210 cases. Spokeswoman Katherine Hoyer says the epidemiologists can’t keep up.
“We can call around 50 cases a day, but we still have 100-to-150 in the queue that never got contacted that day, so hopefully our staff will be able to contact many more positive cases in a 24-hour period," she said.
This is how they’re going to do that. Hoyer says contact tracers will still call and send letters to people who test positive for the virus. But they’ll leave the follow up work to those people and let them notify their own close contacts.
Hoyer says the high case counts are keeping Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene near, and in some days, at capacity.
“Our hospital might say they’re at 92% capacity, but they’re struggling with staffing issues, staff being out if they’re sick, staff being out if they’re exposed, staff being out because they’ve got family that’s sick. So they may have beds but they don’t have enough staff to staff those beds," Hoyer said.
The contact tracing changes are being implemented not only in the Panhandle, but also in three other health districts around Idaho. That includes Boise-based Central District Health, the Southwest and South Central Public Health Districts.