With Minnesota COVID Cases Remaining High, Health and Education Leaders Emphasize In-School Precautions

(KNSI) – The school year has begun for most Minnesota kids, teachers and parents, but with community transmission of COVID-19 still high around the state, Minnesota health and education leaders are urging families and school districts to implement the MDH’s in-school recommendations to prevent the spread of the virus.

“We do know — all of us — how important in-person learning is for students, and we need to take the right actions to make that in-person learning possible and safe,” said Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm. “And to do that, we need to use all the tools in our prevention toolkit.”

Those tools, in part, as recommended by the MDH: encouraging people 12 and older to get their COVID vaccines, universal mask wearing in schools and weekly testing for students, staff and their families, especially if they are involved in extracurriculars.

“One person wearing a mask indoors is some level of protection, but a classroom or a school full of people wearing masks is better protection,” Malcolm said. “Masking is just an excellent complimentary preventative measure in addition to vaccinations for everyone, and for those under 12 who can’t be vaccinated yet, universal indoor masking is particularly valuable in a school setting.”

Without a peacetime emergency declaration, the state cannot mandate mask policies for schools; it has been up to local school districts to determine whether or not to require masks in their buildings. Minnesota Department of Education Commissioner Heather Mueller says the department doesn’t yet have data on how many Minnesota schools are and are not requiring masks, but she anticipates having that information in the next two weeks.

On the national level, the American Academy of Pediatrics says just over a quarter million COVID-19 cases were identified in children (ages 18 and younger) during the week ending September 2nd. Children amounted to 26.8 percent of new COVID cases found in the U.S. that week.

In Minnesota, state infectious disease director Kris Ehresmann says the current pediatric COVID hospitalization rate is 1.3 percent, up from 0.7 percent at this time last year. She says that gives state health leaders pause as kids return to the classroom amid the spread of the COVID delta variant, which is making up 99 percent of genomically sampled COVID cases in the state.

“The good news is that that still is a relatively small number of cases in children that are being hospitalized,” Ehresmann said. “But the concern is that that is doubled from what we saw the fall before.”

Malcolm says the department is keeping a close eye on the state’s COVID situation and will make recommendations for legislative action, but she says asking Gov. Tim Walz to reinstate a peacetime emergency declaration is not on the table yet.

“The idea of a statewide approach to that certainly would be on the list of issues that we, from the health department’s perspective, would suggest would be a good thing to discuss with the legislature,” Malcolm said of a school masking requirement.

Since the start of the pandemic last year, Minnesota has recorded 27,306 COVID cases connected to school settings. More than 9,000 of those cases affected staff, and more than 18,000 students had confirmed cases.

For the state as a whole, from September 3rd to the 8th, Minnesota confirmed 6,992 new COVID-19 cases and 18 newly reported deaths.

The data from the five-day period includes 650 new cases in the five-county St. Cloud area. The area also sees three new coronavirus deaths: two Wright County residents, one in their 70s and one in their 80s, and one Stearns County resident who was in their 60s.

COVID cases confirmed, by county, from Sept. 3 to 8