The way Donna Talerico sees it, you don’t stop shoring up the perimeter — even though the perimeter has been breached more than once.
And you don’t stop pushing, the county’s deputy schools superintendent said, even if the circumstances couldn’t appear to be more daunting.
“Each time we do this, we’re rounding the bend,” she said.
“Each time we do this, it’s one more notch toward normalcy.”
That’s why the county’s sixth-graders will again roll up their sleeves for their second COVID vaccine Wednesday.
And Mon’s middle- and high-schoolers between the ages of 12 and 18 will receive their all-important booster shots next month, Feb. 22-24.
“We know with omicron, those boosters are making a difference,” she said.
The latest round of inoculations for students comes as the pandemic is roiling in new surges across the Mountain State.
Monday morning, the state Department of Health and Human Resources reported that 36 residents died over the weekend of COVID and its complications.
That brings the death count to 5,645 — with a 44-year-old Kanawha County woman being among the youngest of the most-recent victims during the run of the pandemic, which is steaming into its second year.
Another 3,378 West Virginians also tested positive this weekend, adding to the rolls of now 21,417 active cases among the state’s 55 counties.
There are 976 residents occupying hospital beds due to the severity of their cases, with 223 of those in intensive care and another 104 currently hooked to ventilators.
Of the 11 pediatric COVID cases reported, four of those young sufferers are being treated in ICU.
In the meantime, West Virginia was awash in red on the DHHR county alert map.
No counties were showing green Monday, but 49, however — including Monongalia, Preston, Marion and Harrison — were presenting with the aforementioned red, the worst hue for the pandemic.
In Mon schools two weeks ago, 799 students were directly affected by COVID, counting the 359 who tested positive and 440 classmates who were quarantining, due to contact tracing.
District officials attributed that to the holiday break, as Christmas and New Year’s are known for their shoulder-to-shoulder gatherings of family and friends.
While some classrooms have been sequestered, no school in Mon has had to switch over to remote learning, Talerico said.
Thank the district’s mask mandate and other pandemic protocols for that, she said.
There’s a marked difference, Talerico said, between the virus being in a school building — and the virus having the run of a school building.
“We just want to keep COVID at the door.”
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