MARLINTON, W.Va. — While much of West Virginia continues to see dramatic spikes in COVID-19 hospitalizations, some counties are seeing cases level out because of high vaccination numbers.
Pocahontas was the only county in the “green” on the state Department of Health and Human Resources’ COVID-19 County Alert Map on Tuesday. Tucker, Gilmer and Calhoun counties were in the “gold.”
The rest of West Virginia remains in the “orange” or “red.”
Cindy Wilfong, administrator of the Pocahontas County Health Department, told MetroNews they have one of the lowest populations in the state and the county is very rural compared to other areas like Kanawha, Cabell, Monongalia and Berkeley counties that have high infection rates.
In Tucker County, health department administrator James Snyder said he believes their success comes from getting more shots in arms.
Snyder said there’s been hardly any push back from residents who refuse to get vaccinated or wear a face mask.
“They trust the vaccine,” he said. “With this Delta variant and the increase in cases, we’ve seen a good response from people now coming who had not been vaccinated and being willing to get that vaccination.”
Pocahontas County Schools is the only school system in West Virginia to not have a mask mandate in place. Superintendent Terrence Beam said the school board voted Monday to leave masks optional.
“The board felt like we’ve been doing well with the direction we’ve been going, so they decided to continue that,” Beam said.
The decision on masks in schools could change at any time, Beam said.
“That is an open discussion at each board meeting. Depending on what the mitigation strategies look like, how we’re progressing and the number of cases we get will probably determine whether they go to masks or not,” he said.
Beam said the biggest challenge they face is quarantining sick students and staff.
“It’s not necessarily the positive cases. So many teachers and employees are in quarantine that we can’t staff the schools,” he said.
After several heated discussions at school board meetings in Putnam County, the board voted Monday to allow individual schools to issues mask mandates based on positive case numbers.
Schools across the state have reported COVID outbreaks in recent weeks. In Tucker County, Snyder said school officials have played a key role in helping them limit the spread.
“The school system has been very active in identifying those that need to be quarantined and get them out of school for the time that they need to be. I think it’s just everybody doing the right thing,” he said.
Active COVID cases statewide dropped by more than 12,000 from Friday to Tuesday. COVID hospitalizations remained at 955.
Snyder said since Tucker County does not have a hospital, they have to rely on surrounding counties like Randolph to treat COVID patients. He said their case rate is consistent with the winter surge. On Tuesday, Tucker County had 85 active cases.
“Our active cases are still fairly high — too high in our opinion. We’ve been running around that 70 mark for the last couple of weeks. We hope they come down soon,” Snyder said.
It’s been a community effort to slow the surge, according to Snyder, who said county health departments can only do so much to protect residents.
“All the counties are doing the same thing as far as response,” he said. “It really comes down to the residents being willing to accept the recommendations and the guidance that’s out there.”