CLALLAM COUNTY – At this morning’s coronavirus briefing we learned from Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry Unthank that our county has a total of 122 positive cases with 102 of those patients fully recovered. One patient is in the hospital and reportedly showing signs of improvement.
Clallam County has reported about 26 new cases in the last two weeks, or 34 cases per 100-thousand, where the Dr. says we have peaked and remained stable for the last few weeks.
That, she says, puts us in the category of “Moderate Risk” in terms of the state’s recommendations for reopening schools.
“So that puts us at the level from the state recommendations of opening elementary education in person and opening education for high-risk students and students with special educational needs who really aren’t served as well with distance learning. State guidelines are really meant to be kind of a framework on which to make decisions but not infer a mandate on whether you would open or not. And so each individual school district still can make the decisions that make the most sense for their student population, knowing the situation in Joyce may be different than the situation in Seattle. And that’s okay.”
Sequim School Superintendent Rob Clark announced his preferred model for reopening, which would start slow with about 200 struggling and special needs students in classes and gradually add more students every 2-3 weeks.
We were told yesterday by the Superintendent’s office that Port Angeles School District is tweaking they’re original plan to allow all students back to class on a staggered schedule, and a letter to parents this week says they’ll reveal the full plan in a virtual School Board meeting on August 13 at 7:00pm. It remains to be seen whether those tweaks actually pull the plan back to a model more like Sequim’s, but new guidelines announced by the Governor on Wednesday suggest starting with students 10 years and younger.
Unthank also talked about Gov. Inslee’s latest guidelines on how visitors may return to long term care facilities to see their loved ones. The state is issuing a four-phase guideline on visitation that encourages outdoor meetings and correlates with the governor’s four-phase county reopening plan.