MORGANTOWN — Monongalia County Schools will begin administering COVID booster shots to its employees in two separate clinics next month, Deputy Schools Superintendent Donna Talerico said.
More than 800 doses will be given during the two clinics, which will be Nov. 9 and Nov. 18, she told Board of Education members Tuesday.
The staffers will roll up their sleeves after registering earlier, she said.
“Our employees want this and we want this,” Talerico said. “This is something we need to do.”
Speaking during his regular briefing Friday, Gov. Jim Justice, meanwhile, said getting vaccinated in general for the contagion should be a matter of course.
“We do not have a high enough population that is completely vaccinated to really, really slow this thing down,” the governor said.
Today, just 41% of the Mountain State’s 1.8 million residents are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s opposed to the 57.5% showing nationwide, the CDC said.
In Monongalia County, Talerico said the district is prepared to act the second the CDC and Food and Drug Administration give the official go for children ages 5-11 to receive the shot.
Until that happens, a kind of pandemic status quo will be maintained in the district’s buildings both she and Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said.
Which means masks, Campbell said.
That’s at the recommendation of Dr. Lee B. Smith, Mon’s health officer.
Just as Campbell consults daily with the health officer, Smith regularly looks in on the Harvard metric map which West Virginia was using early on in the pandemic.
The state eventually retooled a homegrown version of that map, which is hosted and maintained by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services.
Currently, that means a tale of two hues in Mon County, Campbell said.
The DHHR map shows the county in the green, while the Harvard map has Mon sitting in red.
“Dr. Smith says we’re just not there,” Campbell said. The superintendent, in turn, told Mon’s BOE the mask mandate will need to stay – for a little while longer, at least.
“We think that we’re managing COVID in our schools extremely well,” the superintendent said.
“We just want to ask for more patience from our community,” he continued.
“Keeping the masks on right now is the best thing to do.”
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