Cascade County City-County Health Department said July 11 that the community COVID-19 transmission level is high.

The county added 234 new cases over the last week, continuing the increase over recent weeks.

As of July 11, there were 20 people hospitalized at Benefis Health System for COVID. Of those, 11 were unvaccinated, according to Benefis. None were in the ICU or on ventilators, according to the hospital.

County’s COVID numbers increase slightly [June 2021]

CCHD officials said that if locals have picked up any AccessBio CareStart rapid test kits from CCHD, the expiration date of those tests has been extended to Oct. 31 for lot numbers CP21L37 and CP21L38.

CCHD officials said Monday that they are discontinuing COVID contact tracing and won’t be tracking breakthrough or reinfection cases.

Alluvion closing drive-through COVID testing site on April 30

“We no longer have the emergency staffing that we had earlier in the pandemic. At this point, everyone knows the drill for isolation/quarantine and notifying their close contacts,” according to CCHD.

The isolation/quarantine calculator from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control is available here.

Residents are asked to report their home test results here.

During the July 6 Cascade County Board of Health meeting, Abigail Hill, the county health officer, told the board that about 44 percent were breakthrough cases.

She said they aren’t sending many test samples for variant testing, but the majority of those sampled have been the BA4 and BA5 variants.

She said the positivity rate highest it’s been in awhile, but not the county’s highest rate from the peak of cases.

The rate as of July 11 is 29.68 percent, according to CCHD.

CCHD ordered PCR machines so they can conduct COVID tests for travel purposes and are continuing to provide COVID vaccinations.