Clinton County COVID-19 cases double in a few weeks

Health administrator expects increase as kids return to school
In a lot of cases people weren’t social distancing, weren’t using protective measures and caught it from a co-worker brought it home and gave it to the rest of their family," said Blair Shock, Clinton County Health Department administrator.

Less than two weeks from the first day of class, the Cameron R-1 School District announced the first major change to its reentry plan, requiring all students wear facial coverings. 

The sudden change to its reentry plan came after consultation with Clinton County Health Department Administrator Blair Shock, who anticipates an increase in COVID-19 cases with the start of the school year and school-related activities.

“The school and public health were in agreement that it needed to be done. That’s why we went ahead with it,” Shock said. “I highly suspect it will (go up) with just a large number of people being in close relatively close quarters for a long period of time every day. It doesn’t look like its conjecture at this point because there have been a couple of instances in the US involving outbreaks after school starts.” 

The new rules come two weeks after the Cameron R-1 School District Board of Education unanimously approved its reentry plan. The plan originally only required students grades sixth through 12th to wear facial coverings. According to a statement by the district, facial coverings are required for all students, faculty and staff while in the building, in classrooms and while loading, unloading and riding the bus. Facial coverings may be removed during outdoor activities, physical conditioning, consuming food or beverages or when seeing the mouth as essential for learning or communicating. Exemptions will also be allowed for medical and physical contraindications.

As of Wednesday morning, confirmed COVID-19 cases in Clinton County doubled since the Citizen-Observer last reported the figures in its July 23 edition – up from 42 to 84 diagnoses. DeKalb County saw a 33 percent increase in that same period. Of the four counties encompassing the Cameron R-1 School District, only Daviess County diagnoses remain flat with 17 while Clinton, DeKalb and Caldwell counties saw an increase of 30 cases in just a few weeks. Shock attributed most cases to infections occurring inside a business setting, then spreading to the infected person’s immediate family members. 

“We’ve had a couple of local outbreaks associated with sports camps. Those started with just single cases with a couple of cases tied to those that have a tendency to affect others tied to the same family,” Shock said. “We’ve seen childcare facilities with cases and that caused numbers to increase. The one common factor we’ve seen in all of these is one person in the household contracts it, brings it home and just about everyone in the house catches it and ends up getting sick. What starts as just a few cases ends up being 15 or 20. When you have just a few households of people the numbers start to add up pretty quick versus what we’ve seen before in the outbreak.”

Shock said most instances of COVID-19 were preventable. While evaluating potentially infected citizens, Shock said a theme of not wearing a facial covering and not following social distancing recommendations often emerges.

“It’s a common thread we see. I believe a lot of [infections] were preventable,” Shock said. “In a lot of cases people weren’t social distancing, weren’t using protective measures and caught it from a co-worker, brought it home and gave it to the rest of their family.”

 

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