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Justice Updates West Virginia Color Coding for Schools

August 23rd, 2020 by WCBC Radio

This week, Governor Jim Justice made a series of changes to the county-by-county color-coding system that was recently put in place to communicate the safety status of schools. On Monday, Gov. Justice updated the thresholds that determined the level of openness for each Pre-K-12 school in West Virginia.

The updated thresholds are as follows (based on a seven-day rolling average):

GREEN: 3 and fewer cases per 100,000
YELLOW: 3.1 – 9.9 cases per 100,000
ORANGE: 10 – 24.9 cases per 100,000
RED: 25+ cases per 100,000

Then on Friday, Gov. Justice announced that the county-by-county map is being expanded to include the safety status of nursing homes and has been updated with an enhancement to its metric calculation for low-population counties. The West Virginia COVID-19 Dashboard has been updated to include a live, interactive map that reflects the color status of each county in real-time. The map will now be called the County Alert System and will be used for multiple purposes.

Beyond reflecting how schools in each county will operate, nursing homes across the state will begin using the same green-yellow-orange-red color scale to notify the public about the status of visitation at such facilities within each county. For both schools and nursing homes, Gov. Justice and health experts also announced an enhancement to the metric calculation that determines each county’s color. To account for the possibility of outliers in regions with smaller populations, the metric for counties with fewer than 16,000 residents will be based on the number of new daily cases per 100,000 people on a 14-day rolling average. Meanwhile, the metric for counties with more than 16,000 residents will still be based on the number of new daily cases per 100,000 people on a seven-day rolling average.
Also on Friday, Gov. Justice announced that, at his direction and with the approval of state medical experts, the Department of Education has modified its School Re-Entry Protocol. The new protocol requires face coverings for students in grades 3 and above in various settings:

GREEN: Require face coverings for grades 3 and above on buses and in congregant settings (outside of core groups) where social distancing cannot be maintained.
YELLOW: Require face coverings for grades 3-5 on buses and in congregant settings (outside of core groups) where social distancing cannot be maintained. Require face coverings for grades 6 and above at all times.
ORANGE: Require face coverings for grades 3 and above at all times.
RED: N/a (In-person instruction will be canceled if a county reaches red status).

These requirements are in addition to previously announced protocols for in-person instruction.

One Response to “Justice Updates West Virginia Color Coding for Schools”

  1. August 23, 2020 at 2:04 pm, Timmie Lilly Korczyk said:

    Please please put the name of the county on the appropriate county. It has been years since some people had West Virginia History. Some people have moved here and don’t know where all the counties are located. Thank you.

    Reply

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