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With public health agencies now reporting two-week-old covid case rates and home testing widely available, hospital admissions seem a more reliable indicator.

Those are trending up, even locally.

Coulee Medical Center CEO Ramona Hicks told hospital district commissioners Monday that more tests at CMC for COVID-19 are showing its presence, with the positivity rate rising from 10% last Friday to 18% by Tuesday, including some admissions to the hospital.

Statewide, too, hospitals are recording an uptick in the share of beds occupied by covid patients, but only to 7 percent so far, not the more than 30% seven-day averages seen in mid-January.

The trend turned very personal for Hicks last week. She shared with the board that her mother, who had been in hospice care, passed away on Thursday and that she had just learned her 93-year-old father has tested positive for the COVID-19, along with her brother and sister.

"So it's out there," Hicks said. "It's real, it's still happening."

On the board of directors for the Washington State Hospital Association, Hicks attended a special meeting on Sunday in Walla Walla in which 151 hospitals re-affirmed a commitment not to let any one of them enter alone into "crisis standards," meaning a situation so dire that so few beds and personnel meant that patients had to be turned away.

Instead, in Washington unlike many other states, Hicks said, hospitals shared supplies, equipment and even personnel at the height of the crisis.

That's unlike what happened in Idaho, Texas and other states, "where patients were dying in the hallways in some hospitals, and hospitals down the road wouldn't take their patients," Hicks said.

Hicks, who said she rarely sees masks out in public or even in crowded indoor settings these days, asked her board members Tuesday to "set that example for people."

She said the masking requirement has been hard on hospital staff, where it is still a state mandate.

"It's been a long, long hard haul to have to wear those masks ... throughout their day," she said, "but they're doing it. ... They're real troopers. They're just doing what they have to do and what they need to do to take care of their patients and keep them safe."