Governor Kim Reynolds announced this week that people will no longer have to go into a 14-day quarantine after having close contact with a person infected by COVID-19 if both people were wearing face masks, just as Guthrie County’s 14-day positivity rate has jumped several percentage points to 13.4%.

This percentage nears the 15% threshold that was set by Governor Reynolds as one of the benchmarks for a school to meet in order to request 100% online learning. The eased guidelines for quarantining applies to places like businesses and schools, where in Guthrie County’s case, all school districts have not enforced a mask requirement. Guthrie County Public Health Director Jotham Arber says the Governor’s action should enforce greater mask usage, either from parents or school officials, “I think that if parents want to keep their kids going to school based on these guidelines it would make sense that they would want to enforce that their child wear that face mask and by doing so that should decrease our numbers. So the short answer is yes, I think it probably will lead to enforcement.”

Almost 70 new positive COVID-19 cases have been added in Guthrie County over the last two weeks, bringing the total to 272. The number of COVID-19 deaths also doubled in the past week to a total of 10. The Adair-Casey/Guthrie Center and Panorama districts have both created spreadsheets to track the number of positive cases and those in quarantine. For ACGC, as of Thursday each school building has several students in quarantine, including 59 students from the high school. For Panorama, as of Wednesday 11 students are in quarantine. You can hear more from the latest COVID-19 interview with Arber here.