Schools get good news on COVID as Gulf Coast braces for the worst
WASHINGTON — Officials offered new hope for the safety of U.S. schoolchildren threatened by COVID-19 on Friday as Gulf Coast hospitals already full of unvaccinated patients braced for the nightmare scenario of a major hurricane causing a wave of fractures, cuts and heart attacks without enough staff to treat the injured.
The Biden administration said half of U.S. adolescents ages 12-17 had gotten at least their first COVID-19 vaccine, and the inoculation rate among teens is growing faster than any other age group.
“We have now hit a major milestone,” White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said at a briefing. “This is critical progress as millions of kids head back to school.”
Meanwhile, new studies from California both provided more evidence that schools can open safely if they do the right things and highlighted the danger of failing to follow proper precautions.
A study of COVID-19 cases from the winter pandemic peak in Los Angeles County found that case rates among children and adolescents were about 3½ times lower than in the general community when schools followed federal guidance on mask wearing, physical distancing, testing and other virus measures, officials said.
Another study from Marin County, north of San Francisco, found that a single unvaccinated teacher who came back to school two days after showing symptoms and read to her class without wearing a mask led to 26 other infections in May, before the highly contagious delta variant ran wild.
“Most of the places where we are seeing surges and outbreaks are in places that are not implementing our current guidance,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who discussed the studies at a briefing.
On the northern Gulf Coast, where Ida was forecast to become a dangerous hurricane before it hits Sunday, workers at Singing River Gulfport expect to have to raise flood gates to keep rising water out of the hospital that’s full of COVID-19 patients, the vast majority of whom aren’t vaccinated, said facilities director Randall Cobb.
Complicating matters, he said, was that the hospital is shortstaffed because of the pandemic and also expects to get a flood of patients suffering from ailments that typically follow any hurricane: broken bones, heart attacks, breathing problems and lacerations.
“It’s going to be bad. It’s going to be really bad,” Cobb said.