Guthrie County Public Health Director Jotham Arber shares his perspective on Governor Kim Reynolds’ recent guidance for the percentage of positive COVID-19 cases counties and schools must have before a school can request to temporarily close and move to online learning.

Reynolds announced last week that school districts must give at least 50% of in-person instruction, and they can request to change to temporary virtual learning if the County’s positive rate is 15% or higher, and if 10% of students are absent from class. Arber comments on these thresholds, “I wonder sometimes if that may be just a little bit high in percentages. From an epidemiological standpoint when we’re looking at outbreaks and diseases a lot of times we look at anything above five percent means this thing is going around. So I do wonder if those numbers are a bit high but I think that as far as precautions and mitigation and the steps that they have, I think that those numbers are workable.”

Arber says that locally we should be on guard, as the County can move from five to 20 percent very quickly from one outbreak event in a community. Adair and Guthrie counties’ COVID-19 website has added a 14-day average percentage of residents who have tested positive to their case tracker, which Arber says should help keep local school districts apprised of the ongoing situation. As of Wednesday afternoon, Guthrie County’s positive percentage was 5.6%.