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Unvaccinated patients make up 98% of COVID-19 hospitalizations in St. Luke's Magic Valley

Dr. Kern said Blaine County is a great example of how one of Idaho's biggest COVID-19 hotspots turned into a beacon of vaccinations.

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — While the Gem State enters the fourth surge of COVID-19 cases, fueled in part by the more contagious delta variant, doctors in the Magic Valley are grappling with a growing number of coronavirus patients and an increase in general due to summer.

Dr. Joshua Kern, St. Luke's president of medical affairs, explained to The 208 how St. Luke's in Magic Valley is handling the latest COVID-19 wave.

"Positive cases tend to correlate with need for hospitalization," Dr. Kern explained. "We see about 5%, in the history of the pandemic here in St. Luke's, we see about 5% that test positive end up being admitted, so as positives increase, you can usually portend that more people will end up in the hospital." 

This year, Kern said St. Luke's is seeing record summer volumes of everything.

"We think that there's some combination of people are out and about more so you're seeing more injuries, other viruses are spreading. So we are seeing, as an example, RSV in pediatric patients, we're seeing a lot of RSV hospitalizations where we typically don't see RSV hospitalizations, but I think we delayed a lot of other viral illnesses," he said.

Kern said Blaine County is a great example of how one of Idaho's biggest COVID-19 hotspots turned into a beacon of vaccinations. Blaine County leads the Gem State with 87% of its eligible population being vaccinated.

"We do see less need for admitting patients, though they are having some increase in their community COVID numbers and interestingly, tourists who were unvaccinated so a pretty interesting occurrence up there," he said.

St. Luke's Magic Valley also told The 208 that they began seeing a surge in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the community this week. However, for the last two weeks, they've been steady with about 20 COVID-19 patients in the hospital at a time, a far cry from the peak of about 70 back last fall.

Dr. Kern said more than half of the ICU patients in the Magic Valley are fighting COVID-19 and all of them are now attached to ventilators.

He reiterated that medical experts believe that the breakthrough rate for the delta variant will be about 20%, but it will be much less likely that 20% will need hospitalization.

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