Students, faculty, and staff from schools in Rockland’s yellow zones can get free COVID tests this week thanks to a partnership between the County Department of Health and Good Samaritan Hospital. Starting today, schools in the yellow zone are required to test 20% of students, faculty, and staff in order to stay open for in-person instruction. If the district’s positivity rate is lower than the yellow zone’s current 7-day positivity rate, testing at that school will no longer be required to continue in-person instruction. Testing will take place from 11:00 am – 2:00pm today at Palisades Center Mall Garage Entrance West near Best Buy, tomorrow at Suffern High School, Wednesday at Spring Valley High School, Thursday at Rockland BOCES in West Nyack, and Friday at Palisades Center again. You’ll need to complete a registration form before you go, you can download it here: https://bit.ly/39kFWUt.
Rockland schools, meanwhile, have altered their schedules somewhat as they expect post-Thanksgiving COVID spikes. Clarkstown and Suffern are doing some virtual learning during the winter, while South Orangetown, Nanuet and Rockland BOCES have short all-virtual buffers this week. North Rockland started its “holiday pause” last week, and it runs through January 19th.
COVID-19 by the numbers now, here in Rockland, we’ve got four in the hospital being examined, another 65 have been confirmed with coronavirus, and a total of 1,478 active cases. The state says since the crisis began, we’ve had a total of 21,258 reported cases, 316 more than Friday, and the number of deaths in the county since the pandemic began remains at 695.