Because of the announcement that the state of Idaho is operating under Crisis Standards of Care, Boise State University has been in ongoing dialogue with leadership from Saint Alphonsus Health System, St. Luke’s Health System, Central District Health, the Governor’s office and the State Board of Education to better understand the impact on our campus and operations as well as learn how we might provide additional support to our community.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the university has been working diligently to mitigate the spread of COVID on our campus and across Idaho. Our COVID testing center and lab have collected and processed more than 46,000 tests and our vaccination clinic has administered more than 7,000 doses of the vaccine.
Thanks to the diligence of our students, faculty and staff, our prevention and mitigation efforts are working. According to preliminary results from an institution-wide survey, our campus vaccination rate is approximately 88 percent. Additionally, our campus positivity rate for the past week was 3 percent, a 46 percent drop since last week and a 64 percent drop since our peak this academic year. When you average this rate with the positivity rate from last weekend’s pre-game testing, that rate is closer to 1 percent. This is a continuation of an encouraging downward trend of cases in our campus community and suggests to us that large-scale testing can be paused at this time. In light of our declining campus positivity rates and high vaccination rates, the university will shift from testing all ticket holders in the student section to random sample testing of that population before next week’s football game.
Because of COVID case rates in Idaho, testing capacity throughout the state remains strained. Given the limited capacity for testing, the university is prioritizing its capacity to test Idahoans who are symptomatic, at high risk of contracting COVID, or have had a known exposure. As a consequence, we will not require all ticket holders to provide a negative COVID test result or meet a university testing exemption to gain entry to the next home football game.
As with any public event, ticket holders should test negative before attending the game if they are feeling ill, were exposed to COVID in the last 14 days, or are at high risk for contracting COVID. If you have not been able to test under these conditions, you should not attend the game.
The university will expand its testing operations to ticket holders who need to test before the game to ensure our community’s safety; additional details are forthcoming. We continue to encourage those who can to get vaccinated and invite them to utilize the vaccination tent set up outside the stadium the morning of the game. We will also continue to reward those in compliance with our public health guidelines at our games.
As a reminder, we call upon all of our fans to wear a facial covering in the stadium in order to protect the health and wellbeing of our community.
Boise State continues to closely monitor campus and community conditions and will communicate any changes in protocols as warranted.