MORGANTOWN — “The pandemic is accelerating,” COVID-19 Czar Clay Marsh said Friday.
In the midst of that, Gov. Jim Justice said Friday he and leadership team have to prioritize public health over playing sports – despite all the pleas to the contrary.
That mean they’re sticking with the color-coded maps, he said, to guide school and sports decisions.
Justice said he’s received “lots of requests,” He didn’t specify what they were but talked about the kids who play sports being innocent victims of the numbers in their counties and of the failure of residents to get tested. “Absolutely we have got to understand just this, that we’re dealing with tough stuff.”
He said he called state schools Superintendent Clayton Burch on Thursday and told him to huddle up with SSAC Director Bernie Dolan and the health experts and come up with an independent recommendation on sports.
“These decisions are dog-flat tough,” he said. What they came back with was that they need to keep using the County Alert System map and the School Alert System map to guide how school and sports events will be conducted.
‘”I hate it every way for our kids,” Justice said. “The solution is we’ve got to stay the course. It’s sad, it’s really sad. We have a much, much, much bigger problem than playing sports and we need first and foremost to be in school.”
The Dominion Post asked if, in the face of the accelerating pandemic and all the consternation over who can and can’t play games, if the fairest thing to do would be to shut down all school sports.
Justice said they went through the exercise of considering all kinds of options, from halting playoffs and just allowing counties and extended season to play games if their color code allowed to stopping sports outright.
“What we’re what trying to do is keep some semblance of what we do as people going,” he said. That’s why they chose the status quo, and he commended the team for making the hard choices. “Everybody’s trying to do the best they can possibly do.”
Testing is the only way to slow the virus spread and improve county colors, he said. At one point during the briefing he read off a list of testing sites across the state where only a handful or no one at all showed up. “You’ve got to show up, West Virginia, and get tested.”
Separately, but no doubt tied to the sports questions at hand, the SSAC filed a motion with the state Supreme Court on Thursday (the motion was released Friday) to stay a Berkeley County judge’s injunction to halt the state soccer tournament, set for Friday and Saturday. Because of the timing, the SSAC also requested expedited consideration. No word on the court’s plans was available at deadline.
The numbers
The number of new cases in a 24-hour window reached a record high of 540, with 6,135 active cases. The death toll stood at 487. The daily positivity rate was 4.48% – with 9,860 getting tested on Thursday – and the cumulative rate topped the 3% benchmark at 3.01%.
Three counties were red and nine were orange. The Rt value – a measure of the rate of spread – was 1.11 on Friday afternoon, 11th best; only one state was below 1, meaning the virus wasn’t spreading there.
Marsh noted that the nation has topped 100,000 new COVID cases three days in a row, with a record-high 121,000 on Thursday.
That’s the reason, he said, for staying the course as things get tough and they make decisions that affect the lives and happiness of all the residents. “It is really important to go back to what our real values are. … For me, polar north, true north is saving lives and protecting the well-being of our citizens.”
Tweet David Beard@dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
