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Vermont leaders ask schools to keep masking guidance into October

All but one school observing current recommendations, governor says

Okay, good afternoon everyone. I hope you had a chance to enjoy the long weekend as you know. Last month I announced we were moving forward with the vaccine requirement for state employees in certain areas like corrections, the vets home and the state psychiatric hospital, Which went into effect on September one. At last week’s press conference, I said we were beginning discussions on expanding the policy to more state employees. We have now notified the state employees Union that effective September 15th. All state of Vermont executive branch employees will be required to attest. They are vaccinated or be subject to at least weekly testing and mandatory masking at work. As I’ve said, we want as many people as possible to get the vaccine because we know they work and we feel it’s the best way to put this pandemic behind us. And I continue to urge other employers to follow suit next, as you know. In early september, my administration issued an advisory memo urging schools to mandate mass at the beginning of the school year for all students, regardless of age and vaccination status. Despite what you might have heard, we have achieved a near universal mandate with only one small school, not following our guidance to institute a mask requirement. Let me repeat that because some seem to be missing it by encouraging schools to implement the state’s recommendations. We’ve essentially achieved a universal masking requirement in schools without a state of emergency. Now we did offer an exception after this initial period With the goal of incentivizing vaccinations, which is that once, 80% of the schools eligible students have been fully vaccinated. We recommend the school’s lift the math mandate for those over the age of 12. It’s important to remember this is only for students over 12 where that group is 80% fully vaccinated. Our guidance to school has always been that all those ineligible for the vaccine continue to wear masks until they become eligible. This transition was originally supposed to occur after the 1st 10 school days, but today we’re updating our advisory memo asking schools to maintain the universal masking requirement regardless of vaccination state status, until october four. We hope by then the delta wave that has impacted the entire country. Though fortunately not anywhere near as severe in Vermont will have begun to subside. Secretary of french. He foreshadowed this change with superintendents last week we’ll go into more details in a few moments. We also wanted to make you aware of a school vaccine incentive program we’ve been working on. I’ve directed the agency of education to reserve $2 million and grant dollars for schools who achieve high vaccination rates. There will be bench marriage where the corresponding awards as the school reaches higher percentages funds will be awarded to schools when they reach these thresholds and submit grant requests with input from students. Again, secretary of french, we’re going to further detail but we’re hoping to emphasize just how important it is to be vaccinated because there remains the single best tool we have to move from pandemic to endemic. Now, I’m sure some are wondering whether vaccines make a difference because you’ve been reading so much about the small percentage of breakthrough cases. But before you arrive at that conclusion, it’s important to look at from our data as we’ve learned, the vaccines were designed first and foremost to limit severe illness while we hoped they would nearly eliminate cases. That’s not really how vaccines work. And the goal is to limit the number of people who are a hospital hospitalized or lose their life once vaccinated and they’re doing just that as the entire globe has been hit by delta Vermont with the nation’s most fully vaccinated population also has the lowest hospitalization rate. And that’s no coincidence in short, vaccines continue to save lives. They allow us to do things. We had to leave behind in 2020 and there are best path forward to put this pandemic behind us. But we also have to acknowledge is that Covid isn’t the only virus taking hold right now with the delta wave has come a wave of divisiveness and anger. A resurgence of polarization. It just started to subside earlier this summer. If we’re truly going to move forward. We’ve got to reflect on the language, we use the fear and anger. These words might stoke and the wounds were deepening. This is the time to rally and pull together Because COVID 19 is not going away and we must not let it tear us apart. Especially as the risks are being significantly reduced through vaccines. We’ve already gotten through the hardest part of the pandemic. And we did it together. Let’s let’s rise that challenge once again because we’re beating this virus and with that I’ll turn it over to commissioner p check for the modeling update. Thank you very much. Governor and good afternoon everybody starting first with the the view from the national picture. Uh, we want to start off by mentioning that of course Labor Day might result in some data anomalies nationally regionally and potentially here in Vermont as fewer people potentially went and got tested. Uh, testing turnaround times maybe we’re slowed. Uh, and also state reporting, uh, may have been delayed from their usual timeline. So those are all things to keep in mind as was behavior people potentially gathering and uh, you know, interacting with each other could always lead to additional cases down the road. So those are things that we have to be mindful of. But with those things in mind taking a look at the data even before the Labor Day holiday, you could see that the national case rate, I was starting to bend down that the average was slowing and even starting to decrease the labor day holiday resulted in some anomalies there. But still over this period of time down about 8.4%. But if we go to the next slide, you’ll see this as hospitalizations nationally and the hospitalizations don’t really are not really impacted by those kind of testing timing anomalies that we just mentioned about cases uh, here, the national picture does show that hospitalizations are not just slowing down, but starting to decrease over the last three or four days. Of course we want to keep a close eye on this. Some parts of the country improving more quickly than others, but certainly overall a good sign. Uh, coming back home to the region, you’ll see that we did also have some data anomalies here. When we look at the states that report around us, a couple of states did not report yesterday. However, the majority of them did and they backdated their cases throughout the weekend. So this is a somewhat relevant picture of what’s going on in the northeast. Again, the cases are down about 7.6% compared to last week. But again, take that with a bit of caution and a grain of salt as we wait to see the impacts both the reporting and behavior from labor Day. So looking at Vermont, we wanted to start off with the case numbers or sorry, the testing numbers actually over the last few weeks you can see that are testing numbers were actually relatively stable throughout the Labor day weekend. Our case numbers were also reported on the appropriate days. So we don’t necessarily have those testing decreases or those reporting delays that some of the areas around us have, which makes us a little bit more confident in our data. But again, still the same caveats apply when looking at the Vermont seven day average, you can see over the last five days that seven day average has ticked down. Again. We view that as a bit of good news, but we want to be cautious about what those trends mean over the next week. Similarly looking at the next slide, this is another bit of optimistic news in particular regarding Chittenden County, which saw a pretty considerable spike up in cases through the delta wave. Then saw a plateau for a couple of weeks and now finally has started to see the cases come down. So are most populous county with the highest case load has started to see their cases drop, which is certainly an optimistic sign. You can see, it’s down 34% since August 14. Similarly Washington County which had a couple of outbreaks that will detail in a minute, saw its cases rise throughout this delta wave as well. And again, another bit of good news over the last seven days or so, those cases started to peak and plateau and come down as well down 24% through August 30. When you look at the other counties, nothing too remarkable at the moment. Uh, in terms of a county that might uh, see accelerated case growth. But something that will want to keep a close eye on, like I said over the next week mentioning Washington county and why we saw that pretty significant rise in cases over the last three or four weeks, there are a couple of outbreaks in particular that helped fuel that case growth. I think both of these are known to the public, but again wanting to provide a little bit of detail and then Dr Levin will also provide some lessons learned from these outbreaks and some guidance and recommendations that individuals can make as well. So the first was a summer camp in Washington County That started on August two. So just about a month ago resulted in a small number of cases, but it ultimately grew to 38 cases. This was a situation again where there was a mixture of vaccinated unvaccinated people. Uh, a lot of younger people that weren’t yet eligible to be vaccinated, an opportunity for those that were not yet vaccinated to be inside with each other without mass. So, those are some of the circumstances. Again, Dr Levin will go into more detail. The initial, the wedding outbreak as well was a more recent situation, but at a wedding outbreak in Washington County again, starting on August 26 with a handful of cases. Similarly an event that was indoors and outdoors limited masking and a mixture of people that were vaccinated and unvaccinated in that situation has evolved Into at least 65 cases as of yesterday. So again, just a couple of situations that really can balloon a particular county and community. Again, we’ll have some guidance and recommendations on things that lessons learned from those events and ways to avoid and help navigate uh in the future. So looking at the case rates, we saw that the, the overall rate was coming down a bit. You can see that represented here as well, where the unvaccinated case rate has dropped just a bit, but it’s still significantly higher than the fully vaccinated case rate, which has been pretty much flat for the last few days. Similarly, looking at those rates regarding hospitalization, you can see again, during this entire delta wave, six times more likely to end up being hospitalized If you are not fully vaccinated, the vaccinated. Uh number of people that have ended up in the hospital is relatively stable. As you can see in that difference between the two quite significant, Turning to higher education. Uh, things have been pretty quiet on college campuses, fortunately to start the semester, you can see last week, there were 37 cases on campus this week, 36 cases and the vaccination percentages continue to climb. Now, 93.8 Of students on campus vaccinated with just about 2% having an exemption and the remainder waiting to be vaccinated or getting confirmed in terms of their vaccination status in the long term care facility. Similarly a stable week relating compared to last week, 100 and one cases relating to outbreaks down just a little bit from last week and the same number of open active outbreaks as last week was seven. So again, looking at Vermont compared to some of the other places around the country with different vaccination rates. You see, we still stand out very well, our case rate, our hospitalization rate and our fatality rates are doing quite well compared to even those other regions of the country that are highly vaccinated. And then, you know what all of that means in terms of the case growth and the projections and the trends. You know, we are pretty much following the model from last week. The CDC ensemble model, like we said, there’s a lot of things you can point to in the data that shows signs of optimism. Uh but there’s equally things you can point to that show signs of caution. So While um we’ll take those optimistic items, we do want to not rely on them too heavily and watch the data very closely as this week in particular unfolds. Lastly looking at vaccination, you can see that 2526 new vermonters started vaccination this week That brings are eligible, started up to 86,6%,, You will see on the next slide that the vaccination rate has come down a little bit. This is the second week in a row where the average has dropped down about 6.8% compared to last week still elevated compared to the start of the Delta wave. But down a bit. And then lastly on the vaccine scorecard. You can see Vermont number one uh in uh five of the six categories that we have here but the one category percent of eligible Vermont now ranks third but again number one in all of the other categories in particular those that are fully vaccinated, which we know is the most critical with the delta wave providing the most protection. So with that I will turn this now over to Secretary french. Thank you. Commissioner Paycheck, Good afternoon. Our schools are open now and we continue to be challenged by the higher transmissibility of the delta variant. This is quite a bit of virus. There is quite a bit of virus activity in our community. So we should not be surprised to see it show up in our schools as well. Based on an understanding of the current amount of community spread, we will be making a change to our masking recommendations. As a governor mentioned Previously, we recommended schools require mass for all students and staff for the 1st 10 days of school and this recommendation had been adopted by almost all schools in the state. Our recommendation allowed schools to consider not requiring mass for eligible students and staff. After the 1st 10 days when the student vaccination rate of the school had reached 80%. We will be issuing a revised recommendation that delays this timeline until October 4th. We will continue to recommend mass be required for all ineligible students, including those under the age of 12. We think it is prudent to require mass for all students and staff through the month of september until we have a better understanding of where the virus is heading. We will continue to adjust our recommendations based on conditions for the virus in our schools and our communities. We get information on the conditions for the virus not only from the data that is summarized by Commissioner Paycheck on a weekly basis at these press briefings but also in real time from the surveillance testing and contact tracing processes in our schools. Surveillance testing in schools is now ramping up but we have a good understanding of the conditions in our schools through the contact tracing process. On a daily basis. We’ve been seeing about an average of 12 situations being reported in schools that are then evaluated through the contact tracing process. These situations are not confined to any specific geographic region of the state. This amount of activity has put a lot of work on local school officials and our team at the Health department. Schools have experienced with doing contact tracing from last year we have been meeting to review the contact tracing process for schools to make it more manageable. Contact tracing has proven to be an effective strategy for us and managing the spread of the virus in our communities and for minimizing disruption of the education of our students. We intend to publish recommendations on how to improve the contact tracing process for school soon. In particular, we want to leverage vaccination status to minimize the need for quarantining. Under CDC and Vermont guidelines. Vaccinated individuals who are asymptomatic are by definition not close contacts. Vaccination is the game changer for schools this year, not only in terms of required mitigation strategies, but also for the contact tracing process. We are reviewing all aspects of the contact tracing process based on the feedback from schools and our team at the health department. With our goal of making the process more efficient and responsive in particular. We are working to revise our process so schools have access to the vaccination status of students as quickly as possible. Vaccination will not only keep us protected from COVID-19, it will also simplify the contact tracing process by reducing the number of students and staff that will be quarantining and identified as close contacts. This in turn will reduce the number of amount of time that students are out of school. In short vaccination will not only ensure our health but also ensure the education of our students will not be interrupted. Our students cannot afford to have another year of a disrupted educational experience. Okay to encourage students to get vaccinated, we will be announcing a vaccination and Senate program for schools in the coming weeks. Under this program, we will utilise federal grant funds to encourage student vaccination rates of 80% and above in each school. We’re still finalizing the specifics of this program, but the programme will provide incentive grants to schools based on their student vaccination rate and involve students in deciding how these grant funds will be spent. We expect the grant program to launch in october, and our goal is to encourage a strong uptake and student vaccination prior to the winter months, when many school activities will move fully endorse, that concludes my update. I’ll now turn it over to Secretary smith.

Vermont leaders ask schools to keep masking guidance into October

All but one school observing current recommendations, governor says

Vermont’s top leadership is asking school districts to keep mask mandates in place for students and staff until at least Oct. 4, extending a recommendation set earlier this summer. During a news conference Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott said the recommendation acts as a safeguard to limit transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19. A total of 81 COVID-19 cases have been reported at schools during the current academic year, according to the Department of Health. “We hope by then the delta wave that has impacted the entire country … will have begun to subside,” Scott said. The move to extend guidance follows calls from several Democratic members of the state legislature and at least two superintendents for the governor to issue a formal mandate, concerned too much of the pandemic policy was falling to local boards. Scott countered Wednesday, saying the state has achieved near-universal masking policies without reenacting a state of emergency that would be required to issue the executive order. So far, only one school is not following the state’s recommendations. “By encouraging schools to implement the state’s recommendations, we’ve essentially achieved a universal masking requirement in schools without a state of emergency,” Scott said. The move to extend masking guidance also received praise from Dan French, the state’s top education official. “We think it is prudent to require masks for students and staff throughout September, until we have a better idea of where the virus is heading,” French said. “Our students cannot afford another year of an interrupted educational experience.”Previous recommendations from the state asked districts to keep a mandate in place for the first two weeks of the academic year or until 80% of students were vaccinated. Masks were to remain in place for all students under 12 years old, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine.School vaccination grantsScott also announced Wednesday the state will allocate $2 million for a school-based vaccine incentive program. According to the governor, the Agency of Education will reserve that grant money for facilities that achieve high vaccination rates. Various benchmarks will be set by the agency for schools to qualify. Schools will be able to receive funds by submitting a request to the state, which leadership said will also require input from students. No specific benchmarks were announced by French during the news conference.

MONTPELIER, Vt. —

Vermont’s top leadership is asking school districts to keep mask mandates in place for students and staff until at least Oct. 4, extending a recommendation set earlier this summer.

During a news conference Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott said the recommendation acts as a safeguard to limit transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19. A total of 81 COVID-19 cases have been reported at schools during the current academic year, according to the Department of Health.

“We hope by then the delta wave that has impacted the entire country … will have begun to subside,” Scott said.

The move to extend guidance follows calls from several Democratic members of the state legislature and at least two superintendents for the governor to issue a formal mandate, concerned too much of the pandemic policy was falling to local boards.

Scott countered Wednesday, saying the state has achieved near-universal masking policies without reenacting a state of emergency that would be required to issue the executive order. So far, only one school is not following the state’s recommendations.

“By encouraging schools to implement the state’s recommendations, we’ve essentially achieved a universal masking requirement in schools without a state of emergency,” Scott said.

The move to extend masking guidance also received praise from Dan French, the state’s top education official.

“We think it is prudent to require masks for students and staff throughout September, until we have a better idea of where the virus is heading,” French said. “Our students cannot afford another year of an interrupted educational experience.”

Previous recommendations from the state asked districts to keep a mandate in place for the first two weeks of the academic year or until 80% of students were vaccinated. Masks were to remain in place for all students under 12 years old, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine.

School vaccination grants

Scott also announced Wednesday the state will allocate $2 million for a school-based vaccine incentive program.

According to the governor, the Agency of Education will reserve that grant money for facilities that achieve high vaccination rates. Various benchmarks will be set by the agency for schools to qualify.

Schools will be able to receive funds by submitting a request to the state, which leadership said will also require input from students.

No specific benchmarks were announced by French during the news conference.