Gov. Jim Justice tweaked West Virginia’s color-coded reopening metric for schools after facing criticism that he crafted the standards to make it easier to reopen schools.
Each county will be rated with the color green, yellow, orange or red based on how many new COVID-19 cases the county has per 100,000 people. Schools in counties that score a green (between zero and three new cases per day) and a yellow (between three and nine new cases per day) on the Saturday before the first day of school will be permitted to open.
Counties that are scored orange (between 10 and 24 new cases per day) and red (25 or more new cases per day) by the Saturday before schools reopen will not be permitted to open. If a county begins the year green or yellow and then moves to orange, the schools will be allowed to continue operating, but with heavier restrictions, such as mask mandates.
Justice’s adjustments make it more difficult for schools to open than the code he announced Friday. Although the color codes work the same, it requires counties be at a lower number of new cases per 100,000 people to reach the green, yellow and orange threshold. The numbers will be based on a seven-day rolling average. The color code is based partially on the Harvard Global Health Institute’s map.
The governor’s code will consider an outbreak in a nursing home or a prison as only one case per institution, rather than as individual cases, because those people are confined in an enclosed location. Although he originally planned to count prison and nursing home staff as only half of a case, he will change this to one case because they interact with the broader community.
All counties except for five are in the green or yellow. Only one county, Logan, is in the red.
Justice said he worked with health experts to craft the color-coded system. Although he tweaked his initial plan to make it harder to reopen schools, he said critics of his initial plan were “preposterous” for alleging the plan was designed to force West Virginian’s back to school regardless of public health concerns.
“Nobody is going to pressure me in any way to put our teachers, our service personnel, our kids, especially, back into a situation that I feel in my heart is not as safe as we can possibly make it,” Justice said.
The numbers used for the code will be calculated by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
