During a recent meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Health, county health officer Dr. Scott Douglas said he is hopeful, but reserved about the cold months ahead when the coronavirus (COVID-19) will have more opportunity to spread indoors.
The cautious optimism is caused by low numbers of infections in Montgomery County, he said. The state’s number of positive cases are also trending downward.
However, that could all change when people move indoors and congregate in groups for the holidays.
“We’re still concerned, especially as we move into some of the colder months,” he said.
Low rates of infection have played a part in allowing middle and high school students to move back to full in-person instruction beginning Monday, an effort Douglas and others at the health department worked closely with school administrators to achieve.
“We have been pleasantly surprised at what we’ve seen, and that is we have not seen kids transmitting the infection in the school setting,” Douglas said. “The kids that have been positive, we believe, contracted the infection outside of school. And also, since the mask mandate our numbers in the state and Montgomery County have started to trend down.”
Elementary-aged students have been attending classes full time since school began in August, but secondary-level students are another matter.
Those students are more social, they congregate in groups outside of school and in their social clubs and in their athletics, so we’re a little more worried about infections in that setting, and we’ll pay close attention to that,” Douglas said. “But we were feeling really good about what we’d seen.
“The kids have been far more compliant with the masks than I think anyone imagined.”
Wabash College has been testing roughly 10% of the student body weekly, Douglas added, saying low numbers have been reported there as well.
“Last week they had very, very good numbers,” he said. “In terms of their first round, they tested almost 90 freshmen and didn’t have any positives.”
Douglas reported that Indiana is now listed as 24th-worst in the United States for transmission rates of COVID-19 compared to ninth about a month ago.
“I think that all had to do with the numbers that were going up in July and the state really made a big difference with people’s behaviors about the masks,” he said. “I think it made everybody a lot more conscientious and just made it seem more real to people.”
