Pleasant Valley Superintendent Lee Lesisko addressed parents’ questions Thursday about going to full in-person instruction.

Some school districts in neighboring counties have returned to full-time.

Lesisko turned to two St. Luke’s University Health Network faculty to weigh in on the topic at the board meeting..

“We are topping out at some pretty high numbers as far as daily COVID rates,” Rajika Reed, senior network director of epidemiology and strategy.

Reed presented several slides to explain the behavior of the virus. The first slide showed that the number of infections continues to increase, but the number of deaths is not increasing as fast. This is because the medical community has learned how to treat people with the virus, she said.

The numbers

The second slide showed the increases in the virus based on county and compared Monroe County to its neighbors. The third slide showed those numbers in regards to incident rate per 100,000 people and percent of positivity, which are the two main factors in determining the model for instruction developed by the state Department of Education.

The DOE guidelines established this summer stated that if the incident rate per 100,000 people is less than 10 people and the percent of positivity of the virus in the community is less than 5%, then this would indicate a low level of transmission of the virus in the community. School districts could operate full time with in-person instruction.

If the positivity rate is between 5% and 10%, it indicates moderate transmission of the virus. The DOE recommends blended (hybrid) instruction or full remote (online) instruction.

Compared to several counties in the Pennsylvania, Monroe and Carbon counties have been keeping numbers low, but things are changing.

“In Monroe County, we’ve done a phenomenal job in flattening that out,” Hauth said about the summer leading into the school year. “Now, we have a little different situation where everything is moving up.”

According to the state Department of Health, Monroe County’s incidence rate for the most recent week of Oct. 23 to 29 was 44.2 and a positivity rate of 5.4%. This is up from a 34.8 incidence rate and 3.8% positivity rate for the previous week from Oct. 16 to 22.

Reed said the data would be updated today. In order to give some insight into those numbers, she looked at the daily counts this week and found the incidence rate for Monroe County had jumped to 90.3 with a positivity rate of 14.7.

“Cases are going up exponentially,” said John Hauth, senior director for sports medicine relationships. “We’ve seen incredible increases over the last four weeks. The data and everything we’re looking at over the next four to six weeks suggests that we’re going to experience a bit of a rough patch here.”

Before opening up to full-time in-person instruction, the positive cases needs to come down, Hauth said.

“We don’t want the school experience to be negatively impacted by any of our decisions,” he said.

With college students coming home, families getting together for the holidays, flu season, and COVID fatigue, the numbers could increase more, he said.

Waiting until the new year would be a better time to consider full-time in-person instruction.

“The hybrid model really has been very successful at keeping transmission low,” Reed said.

School districts have been able to keep cases down, and those that did occur were due to exposure in the community, not in the school. She said keeping vigilant with the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is important.