Understanding COVID-19 Data

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, St. Luke's has relied upon data to inform our response. Data guides our readiness planning, patient care and resource management decisions. St. Luke's also shares data with local, state, and national public health agencies to support civic and community health leaders in shaping policies and guidelines that impact health care, the economy and education in Idaho. 

Recognizing how current and relevant data can help inform decisions and behaviors, St. Luke's created a dashboard to provide the community with visibility to statistics and trends within St. Luke's Health System related to COVID-19 activity.

Dashboard data is complete for the previous day and represents a point in time. Where useful, it includes rolling averages and trend lines. These numbers are for St. Luke’s activity only; for information on other hospitals, health systems, the state of Idaho and other health care organizations, please consult these national, state and local resources.

St. Luke’s knows coronavirus data viewed alone or displayed without context does not provide a clear or accurate view of pandemic activity in our community. To help you navigate the numbers, please first review the key metric descriptions, as they explain each data point included on the dashboard and why it matters.

Note: On Nov. 12, 2021, St. Luke’s updated the COVID-19 hospitalization data in the dashboard to provide a more accurate report of COVID-19 hospitalized patient census. The previous data was underreporting the COVID-19 patient census as it was only including those in COVID-19 isolation precautions due to active viral shedding. Now the data reflects patients admitted due to COVID-19 independent of their isolation status and more accurately represents the impacts of those patients on the overall health system capacity.