American Disease
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
FLORIDA
The superintendent of the school district in Florida’s capital said Monday that he will require students to wear masks amid an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations fueled by the delta variant, defying the governor’s attempts to block schools from imposing such a mandate.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office responded by saying the state’s Board of Education could move to withhold salaries from the superintendent or school board members. Though the Leon County mandate allows exemptions for students with a physician’s or psychologist’s note, it doesn’t give parents the authority to opt out, as DeSantis wanted.
Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna announced in a livestreamed announcement that children from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade will be required to wear masks when classes resume in Tallahassee on Wednesday.
“I did a lot of soul searching, a lot of thinking,” Hanna said. “If, heaven forbid, we lost a child to this virus, I can’t just simply blame the governor of the state of Florida. I can’t.” (Associated Press)
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ARKANSAS
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TEXAS
Gov. Greg Abbott appealed for out-of-state help Monday to fight the third wave of COVID-19 in Texas.
The request came as a county-owned hospital in Houston raised tents to accommodate their COVID-19 overflow. Private hospitals in the county already were requiring their staff to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Meantime, the Dallas school district announced Monday that it would require students and staff to wear face masks starting Tuesday. The Houston school district already announced a mask mandate for its students and staff later this week if its board approves.
The highly contagious delta variant is fueling the wave.
Abbott has directed the Texas Department of State Health Services to use staffing agencies to find additional medical staff from beyond the state’s borders as the delta wave began to overwhelm its present staffing resources. He also has sent a letter to the Texas Hospital Association to request that hospitals postpone all elective medical procedures voluntarily. (Associated Press)
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KENTUCKY
Seventeen months since its first confirmed case of COVID-19, Kentucky surpassed a half-million cases on Monday, a concerning milestone after several months of declining numbers of infection.
The state now reports a total of 500,267 cases, following daily case reports that began a sudden climb in mid-July after dropping as more Kentuckians became vaccinated.
Fueled by the fast-spreading and highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19, new cases of the virus have spread rapidly throughout Kentucky, causing hospitalizations to jump, largely among the unvaccinated.
On Monday, 1,139 people were hospitalized compared to a few hundred a day in June and early July. Numbers of patients in intensive care and on ventilators also have risen steadily. (Courier Journal)
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COLORADO
Boulder County Board of Health on Monday unanimously approved the decision to mandate masks for all students and staff members in all schools or at child care facilities regardless of their vaccination status.
The order will take effect Tuesday.
“Now we’ve got fall, we’ve got more time indoors, and we have less transmission control going on so there’s just a lot of factors,” Gregg Thomas, the board of health president. said Monday night. “We’re in a race against Delta or whatever comes after Delta and it’s just unfortunate.”
The board had a virtual meeting Monday evening to update its public health order, which requires that everyone 2 years or older in school buildings and child care facilities wear masks. The mandate also requires that schools enforce quarantine and isolation protocols when someone tests positive for the virus and participate in contact tracing. (Times-Call)
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MICHIGAN
Anyone entering a building on a University of Michigan campus must wear a mask — regardless of their vaccination status — in an effort to further slow the spread of COVID-19, university leaders announced Monday.
The new rule takes effect Wednesday and applies to the Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn campuses. It comes amid a national pandemic resurgence, spurred in part by COVID-19 spreading among unvaccinated people and the delta variant of the coronavirus.
"I know that we’ve already become accustomed to not wearing a mask if vaccinated, but we want everyone in our community to be as safe as possible, especially as the highly infectious delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread," university President Mark Schlissel said in a news release. (Detroit Free Press)
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IOWA
Iowa has started tossing out tens of thousands of expiring COVID vaccine doses as demand for the shots continues to sag.
The state has discarded 81,186 doses of the vaccine so far, said Sarah Ekstrand, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Public Health. That includes doses that expired, plus some that were wasted for other reasons, such as when a multiple-dose vial was opened and couldn't be used up quickly enough.
Ekstrand said Monday that federal officials said states could not return unused vaccines to the manufacturers or donate them to other states or countries. "We have exhausted all options prior to vaccine expiring," she said in an email to the Des Moines Register.
The department warned last month that the state might have to discard about 217,000 doses of vaccine by the end of August unless demand picked up. Ekstrand said Monday that about 30,000 of those doses are Johnson & Johnson shots, whose expiration dates have been bumped back to mid-September by federal regulators….
Eli Perencevich, an infectious disease physician and medical professor at the University of Iowa, said he still hopes demand will pick up. "But it's going to take effort," he said.
In some rural Iowa counties, fewer than 40% of residents have been vaccinated, Perencevich noted. The state needs to increase outreach efforts, including in places such as churches and schools, he said. (Des Moines Register)
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SOUTH CAROLINA
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said Monday he will not enact any new mask mandates to protect against the spread of COVID-19 and the highly transmissible delta variant, despite a new surge of positive cases throughout the state.
McMaster, standing alone at a lectern without any health officials at his side, said the delta variant poses a new threat and spreads more easily, but mandating masks in schools or adding restrictions will not happen.
“Shutting our state down, closing schools and masking the children ... who have no choice, to protect adults who do have a choice, is the wrong thing to do, and we’re not going to do it,” McMaster said. “We’re not going to shut our state down as other states did. Mandating masks is not the answer. Personal responsibility is the answer.”
The governor’s press conference came amid a spike in positive cases especially among unvaccinated South Carolinians.
On Friday, the Department of Health and Environmental Control reported more than 3,200 new coronavirus cases and 16.3% of tests coming back positive. More than 634,000 South Carolinians have contracted the virus. More than 8,700 people in the state have been confirmed to have died from from the virus, with an additional 1,100 probable deaths from COVID, according to DHEC data.
To stop that spike, last week Columbia City Mayor Steve Benjamin put the city under a state of emergency and the City Council voted to require masks in elementary and middle schools, a move that is likely to spark a court challenge.
McMaster said the city’s ordinance is illegal because it contradicts a state law and parents should decide whether their child wears a mask in school.
But he also said it’s difficult for people to hear one another while someone’s talking and wearing a mask. As an example, he asked a masked reporter to repeat herself when he had trouble hearing her question. (The State)
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WASHINGTON
Citing a spike in COVID-19 infections driven by unvaccinated people, Gov. Jay Inslee on Monday issued a sweeping order requiring most state employees — along with hundreds of thousands of health care workers — to get vaccinated soon or lose their jobs.
State workers will have until Oct. 18 to get fully vaccinated and show proof, or face “nondisciplinary dismissal” for failure to meet job requirements, according to Inslee’s office. Contractors who work on state job sites also must comply. (Seattle Times)
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MAINE
The Portland Hunt & Alpine Club is one week into enforcing its new vaccine requirement for indoor dining and co-owner Briana Volk says that asking customers to produce a vaccination card has gone well.
“We’re a bar. We card people all the time. This is just another way of carding,” Volk said. “It’s really not a big deal. No one in person has been upset about it.” She said the restaurant has taken some criticism online about the move, but most people are supportive. (Portland Press Herald)
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SOUTH DAKOTA
The Sioux Falls School District Board of Education approved a new, updated version of the district’s Continue to Learn plan Monday night, which now states that masks are “encouraged.”
Face coverings or masks to protect against COVID-19 are encouraged to be worn in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade as the ongoing global pandemic continues into the start of a second school year, because students under the age of 12 are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, according to the plan.
Students in sixth through 12th grade are also encouraged to wear face coverings if they’re not vaccinated. Students are also encouraged to wear masks on buses.
All staff are encouraged to wear face coverings at school and on buses. Vaccine verification will not be required for students or staff. (Argus Leader)
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LOUISIANA
LSU announced more details on its plan for starting classes in the midst of a massive surge in COVID cases in a letter sent to students Monday.
Before arriving on campus, students will need to show proof of one of three things:
A negative COVID test no more than 5 days before arrival
A COVID vaccine
A positive test result no more than 90 days prior to your arrival on campus
To show proof they met one of those criteria, students must upload documents to an online portal. They will receive a confirmation email, which students should be prepared to show upon arriving on campus as proof they followed the rules, the letter said. (Baton Rouge Advocate)
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What do I think of all this?
1. I agree with President Biden: Governors should do more to help — or, at least, get out of the way.
2. I agree with Senator Cassidy: Governors should believe in local control and stop mandating what community leaders and public health officials can and cannot do to protect their citizens.
3. School administers by and large seem to be rising to the occasion.
4. We still need more/faster/better funded studies so we aren’t flying blind.
5. Whatever happened to the imperative of tracking and tracing?
6. The leaders of state governments are by and large too exhausted and overwhelmed to look at and adapt the best practices from all over the nation. Governors should take the time to solve this.
7. Our PSAs are still horrible and uncreative.
8. We should all be for freedom, open businesses and schools, and policies and practices that get many more people vaccinated.
9. I have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the vast majority of unvaccinated Americans are imposing a series of costs on the rest of us that are extremely selfish and foolish. Both Pogo and Shakespeare were right about who is to blame.
10. The fall could be great — or a nightmare.
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