EAGLE COUNTY, Colo. — As Eagle County Schools prepares to take a weeklong Thanksgiving break, it is contending with rising COVID-19 cases and quarantines among its staff and students.
“We’re trying really hard to keep schools open, but we’ve come close at a couple of locations to shifting to remote,” said Superintendent Philip Qualman at last week’s school board meeting. “We’ve gone through 12 weeks of school with that as a last-resort option that we have not had to entertain, but it’s getting closer.”
According to the Eagle County coronavirus monitoring dashboard, there has been a recent spike in case incidence rates for all school age groups that started around Oct. 31.
“We think that’s related to some Halloween parties, festivities, activities,” Qualman said at the meeting. “We hope that spike is starting to come down.”
However, during the week of Nov. 7 — the most recent data on the dashboard — the numbers were still rising. The rate of infections per 100,000 people by that date was at 3.07 for children under 5, 8.93 for children between 5 and 10, 9.3 for kids between the ages of 11 and 13, and 6.36 for youth between 14 and 17.
> Watch the video above: 'Increased tensions' over Eagle County Schools mask policy sees response from deputies
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