DELAWARE - Governor John Carney says education is one of his top priorities for the New Year. He also revealed that 431 people were being treated for COVID-19 in Delaware hospitals as of Tuesday.Â
Governor Carney recommended schools operate fully remote from December 14th, 2020 to January 11th, 2021. He is now urging them to resume hybrid learning on Monday. Carney, DPH Director Dr. Karyl Rattay and Secretary of Education Susan Bunting presented this letter to Delaware schools on Tuesday, outlining their reasons why hybrid learning can resume and different options for gradually bringing students back in person. DPH says the virus is spreading the most where people gather outside of structured environments, not in schools.
"2021 is going to be way better," Carney says. "It can't be any worse than 2020."
Carney says getting children back in physical classrooms and making sure that the vaccines the state is receiving from the federal government are being put in the arms of Delawareans.
The number of COVID-19 vaccines received by the state and its current phase in the distribution plan can be found in the online vaccine tracker.
In addition to calling schools to go back to hybrid learning, DPH also unveiled a new data dashboard on Tuesday to track the number of contagious cases in Delaware schools and to offer a more detailed picture of the COVID-19 infection in school buildings.
"It doesn't mean that people got their infection in school," says Dr. Rattay. "In fact we saw in our epidemiology reports over and over again, we saw that they did not get their infection in school."
Secretary Susan Bunting has met with every school district and charter school in the state while hybrid learning was on pause, determining concise, transparent communication to be a common goal. She says updating school data from the reopening dashboard that came out in the summer is a good start.
"To change the dashboard, to make it more informative, to give graphs instead of statistics, to take care of information that is district oriented, town oriented, county oriented," Bunting says.
DPH says more data will be populated on the dashboard in mid-January as more students go to class in person.
When asked if he would lift the 30-percent capacity and 10 p.m. curfew on bars and restaurants on January 11th, Governor Carney said he will consider it as he looks at the data in the coming weeks.