BOISE, Idaho — Trends are normally what is popular or preferable for fashion, what is likable or shareable on social media. It's also defined as the general direction in which something is developing, the way something bends.
Bending curves, or rather flattening them, is what we have been advised to watch when it comes to COVID-19 as trends have become an important statistic in that collection of information.
Every day, if you look at our numbers linearly, Idaho's total number of confirmed cases has gone up.
However, Mike Mastropaola on KTVB's The 208 Facebook group suggested that people need to look at the numbers differently. "Instead of giving us total COVID numbers, why aren't we getting new cases and number people in hospitals. Shouldn't we be looking at trends rather than totals going forward," he wrote.
Well Mike, we've been looking at those trends, which is one of the reasons that Idaho is on the path to reopening sooner than other states. The Gem State's daily new number of confirmed and probable cases have been trending downward since April 2, when there was a massive spike in new cases.
Idaho's daily number of confirmed cases spiked on April 2 with 227 confirmed cases. The next two largest spikes in confirmed cases were on April 9 with 94 and April 20's total of 58 confirmed cases. Between April 20 and May 4, the largest spike was 33 confirmed cases in a single day.
Since the massive spike on April 2, Idaho's daily number of confirmed cases has trended downward to roughly 30 per day.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare releases the state's latest data on COVID-19 Monday through Saturday at 5 p.m., with plenty of statistics and graphs on Idaho's battle against the coronavirus.
As of Monday evening, there are roughly 2,100 confirmed cases in Idaho, which has steadily increased since the state's outbreak began in March. While the number of confirmed cases has steadily increased, testing has not.
Since February 26, Idaho has conducted over 30,000 COVID-19 tests through state and private labs. The lowest number of tests completed in a day was one on February 26. The highest number of tests done in one day was on March 23 when over 1,100 tests were run for COVID-19. Between then and April 13, daily test numbers stayed around that number, until it began dropping to 115 by April 21, which is the last day of daily testing data available.
While Idaho's total number of confirmed coronavirus cases as climbed, the daily total of new cases have trended down for weeks, which is the goal of the stay at home order and shutdown of much of Idaho's economy.
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