Monongalia County is losing its COVID blush by degrees.
On Wednesday, Mon was showing gold on the County Alert map maintained by the state Department of Health and Human Services.
So were its neighbors of Preston and Marion. All told, nine of West Virginia’s 55 counties presented green, the map’s best hue for safety and low infection rates, while just three — Fayette, Mercer and Mingo — were sitting in red, the worst designation.
While things on said map are literally lightening up, so too are some of the pandemic protocols in Mon County Schools these days, save for one.
Students and staffers will be still required to wear masks — at least for now.
Eddie Campbell Jr., the district’s superintendent, talked about that during Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting.
“Our kids have been tremendous,” he said. “I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
The superintendent last week announced the district is lessening those once-stringent quarantine measures, now that omicron appears to be on the wane.
That no longer means automatic isolation for whole classrooms, should a student or teacher present with a positive diagnosis, he said.
Strict quarantining from months gone by led to the byproduct of “pandemic math,” with literally hundreds of students being sent home and whole sports teams benched, due to concerns over contact.
The district made the call to lessen that section of protocols after repeated consults with Dr. Lee B. Smith, the county health department’s medical director.
“This is really gonna help us keep kids in school,” the superintendent said.
However, there is a caveat — in the form of those still-mandated facial coverings, Campbell stressed.
“The reality of this is that it’s still a compromise,” he said.
“The compromise is that as long as we maintain our universal masking, we’ll be able to eliminate the contact tracing and extended quarantines.”
Echoing Campbell, BOE member Ron Lytle praised students for their mask-wearing diligence — and their parents for being patient.
“I’d like to thank the kids for going through what they’re going through, and protecting the community,” he said.
Another reality is that West Virginians are still coming down with COVID — and dying from it.
The DHHR on Wednesday reported 39 additional deaths from the day before to that morning, bringing the grim roll call to 5,939.
A 50-year-old woman from Calhoun County is the youngest of the most-recent victims.
Of the current 8,339 active cases statewide, 906 of the sufferers are currently hospitalized, with 215 in intensive care and 112 on ventilators.
Pediatric cases in that group number 12 hospitalizations, with four of the young patients in intensive care and another three also tethered to vents.
Lytle’s BOE colleague Mike Kelly, meanwhile, said he’s going to keep attaching himself to both the science, and the medical direction from Smith and the health department — especially where masking is involved.
He pointed to a conversation he had recently with a parent urging he and the board to drop masking altogether.
“They said, ‘Well, let’s just try. Let’s try it without the mask.’ What does that mean — you try it without the mask and a student dies? I’m not willing to take that chance.”
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