Kudos to the local nursing home staff! Kudos to the local nursing home staff!

Thanks to unbelievably good attention to detail (and some good luck) on the part of Good Samaritan, Mountain Valley and Pacifica. The Silver Valley appears to continue to dodge huge tragedy and crisis. Seriously, thank you all for your very stressful work, help, communication efforts and attention during these times.

Overall the COVID crisis does appear to be easing at the moment in our part of the country, but we are in no way out of the woods.

At Shoshone Medical Center, we are still having informative meetings with new information coming in from the state on what is next. The weather and the seemingly consistently good news in North Idaho is resulting in the population getting out of their homes and moving about the community more than they have. We will see if the CV cases then pop or continue to fade. There are computer models that show statistical percentages of contacts at places like grocery stores or other community common spots can either increase the spread again or hold the line if people will continue social distancing, masks and gloves at this point in the curve. Pray for the latter and encourage your friends and family to remain cautious for the time being.

As of Monday, our COVID testing capacity at SMC remains about the same as it has been. We are still hopeful that this will improve in the near future. In the meantime, we are sticking to our current protocols.

DR. DAVID LAWHORN