CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — This week Texas became the first in the country to surpass 1 million COVID-19 cases. Texas also set a new daily record for COVID-19 cases in one day with over 10,800 reported back on Tuesday. Then there are hotspots like El Paso and Dallas along with Lubbock which are seeing their numbers in some cases going up by 80%.
Here in the Coastal Bend as several schools have started to go back to virtual learning because of the rise of COVID-19 cases in the classroom.
“It’s like 60 percent of those who are positive are in face to face instruction,” said Health Director Annette Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is talking about the overall percentage of school faculty throughout Nueces County who have tested positive for COVID-19 since the start of the school year. Here are the actual numbers so far.
“We’re seeing more cases in the faculty population so yesterday I had 101 faculty members who are positive over you know the past few months and out of 101,” said Rodriguez. “63 were actually practicing face-to-face instruction.”
The percentage of students attending face to face classroom instruction and testing positive is just below 50 percent.
“For the student population we have 262 positive cases as I mentioned. 120 of those were face-to-face instruction,” said Rodriguez.
The rising number of positive COVID-19 cases among teachers and students in the classroom has prompted several area schools to go back to virtual learning. That’s happened recently in places like Robstown and Beeville. Corpus Christi ISD shutdown Allen elementary last week and returned to virtual learning until the 16, after several staff members tested positive.
“In our district our human resources department, our office of our nursing, our director of nursing, and our director for student support for instructional support, also work very closely with Annette at the health department in determining if a campus needs to close down,” said Dr. Sandra Clement, Executive Director of School Leadership for CCISD.
Dr. Clement tells 3News that the job of trying to determine whether to shut down a school’s face to face classroom instruction is becoming more difficult as we move closer to winter.
“So, looking at that, looking at even staff, they may go out because they’re sick. But then they may find out it wasn’t COVID because people are getting sick with colds and they’ve got allergies and the weather is changing,” said Dr. Clement. “So, there’s a whole lot that goes into deciding that.”
Rodriguez says there’s another situation that they’re battling when it comes to COVID-19 in the schools.
“A lot of the parents are not wanting to test their children because of sports they wanna make sure they continue to practice the sports and so that’s unfortunate because you really don’t want to let kids practice sports if they think they may have COVID-19,” said Rodriguez.
Rodriguez wants to remind parents that if they are COVID-19 positive then their children need to remain in quarantine at home and study virtually.
With our COVID-19 case count rising the health of everyone depends on people being responsible and following those safety guidelines we’ve all know we should be following.
For the latest updates on coronavirus in the Coastal Bend, click here.
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