MORGANTOWN — With Delta variant cases on the rise in West Virginia and elsewhere, Monongalia County’s school district is again asking its students, teachers and staffers who haven’t been vaccinated to collectively roll up their sleeves for the cause.
The clinics are for anyone aged 12 and up, and will be held in August at Mon’s middle schools and high schools.
Each jab in each arm, said Donna Talerico, the district’s deputy superintendent, will be one more notch toward normalcy.
“That’s how we get back to football, prom and all those ‘normal’ things,” she said.
The first vaccines go into arms Aug. 2 and Aug. 3, the district said.
Everyone comes back for the second dose Aug. 30 and Aug. 31, after the first week of the new year for school.
The Aug. 2 and Aug. 30 times and locations are as follows:
- Clay-Battelle High School, 8-9 a.m.
- Suncrest Middle, 10-11 a.m.
- University High, noon-1 p.m.
- Westwood Middle, 2-3 p.m.
- Aug. 3 and Aug. 31 locations:
- Mountaineer Middle, 8-9 a.m.
- South Middle, 10-11 a.m.
- Morgantown High, noon-1 p.m.
Lunch will also be served 11-11:30 at all the schools on their days.
The district, for now, is lifting the mask mandate for fall, with the blessing of the county health department, Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said.
All that, however, the superintendent stressed, is contingent upon the coronavirus and its one particularly persistent variant strain.
At a press briefing last week, Dr. Clay Marsh, the state’s COVID-19 czar, gave some grim details on the fortunes of the Delta variant across the nation.
The physician said more reports are coming in detailing younger patients in the intensive care unit, placed on ventilators and respirators.
And it appears the majority of them had opted out of the shot, he said.
“One doctor said that when people are about to be put on a respirator because their lungs are failing, they ask, ‘Can I get vaccinated now?’ ”
The patients, Marsh recounted, don’t like hearing the answer doctors have to give at that point, since by then in the pandemic proceedings, it’s simply too late for the dose.
“We don’t want it to be too late for any West Virginian,” the COVID czar said.
“There really is no time to wait. Every West Virginian who hasn’t been vaccinated is at great risk with this Delta variant. Today is the day. Now is the time.”
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