FAIRMONT — Lloyd White has a prescription to stop COVID.
Just keep following the standard protocols, the director of the Marion County Health Department said Wednesday.
That’s in response to an ongoing mini-spike of cases at Rivesville Elementary-Middle School.
From last week through Wednesday, a total of 34 cases — 24 students and 10 staffers — have been recorded at the school, which is a still a social hub in the town that sits along the banks of the Monongahela River near Fairmont.
The uptick in cases prompted Marion Schools Superintendent Donna Hage to close three classrooms on the elementary side of the building as a precaution Monday.
Hage said the idea was to let the contagion “calm down,” in a landscape where a positive diagnosis can be more likely than not — given COVID’s variant forms.
“The weather’s getting warmer and people getting together more. It’s not a surprise that we’re still having cases.”
White agreed. That’s why he commended the district’s decision to temporarily shutter the classrooms.
“The goal is to stop the progression,” he said of the people-to-people spread in the school which houses 334 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
“You do that by wearing masks, washing your hands and getting vaccinated. All the common-sense things.”
Cases in Monongalia County’s school district are slightly up as well, the district said.
The district ended last week with 11 positive cases among its students. Another eight staffers carried the same diagnosis.
Monongalia County on Wednesday was showing yellow on the Alert Map maintained by the state Department of Health and Human Services. That’s on the cusp of WVU’s 2022 Commencement exercises, which run Friday through Sunday.
Taylor County and Marion are in the yellow, too,
Counting the above three, 12 counties in all Wednesday were presenting that shade, which is second-best on the map. In all, 43 counties were sporting green, the best.
Mon currently has 103 active cases, the DHHR said, with 75 in Marion and 18 in Preston.
A total of 6,886 state residents have died from COVID since March 2020.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
