MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Va. (WDBJ) – Many colleges and universities around the country have had to change their academic plans at the last minute because of increased cases of COVID-19. This news has some wondering if that could happen to Virginia Tech and Radford University as well.

The first thing the director of the New River Valley health district, Dr. Noelle Bissell, said was that it’s not a matter of if the number of COVID-19 cases go up but when they go up.

However, the key to determining the right course of action will be to look at those numbers in the bigger picture.

“Everybody wants the numbers and everybody looks at the numbers, but they don’t always have the context,” Dr. Bissell said. “Before those numbers hit the dashboard, my staff has already started investigations and in many cases already completed investigations.”

Making headlines this week, UNC Chapel Hill cancelled in-person learning just after a week of being open because of four coronavirus clusters.

It’s important to note that a cluster is different than an outbreak though.

“You have a group of people, family members for instance, a household or close friends or a social circle, that’s a small cluster,“ Dr. Bissell explained, adding that it’s when clusters connect to other clusters that the situation starts to be an outbreak.

She and the rest of the NRV Public Health Task Force has worked with local college and university leaders to come up with plans for either scenario on their campuses.

“I think any of the schools are at risk for having to revert to remote and online,” she cautioned. “My hope is that it’s not a knee jerk or panicked reaction and that we can communicate what we’re seeing in the area.”

Part of the cluster of COVID-19 cases at UNC Chapel Hill was attributed to college partying. Dr. Bissell’s word of warning is not to assume an outbreak will come out of every gathering.

“If you talk about if there’s 30, 40, 50 people there and you have an exposure, it’s not going to be 50 people exposed,” she said. “It’s going to be a handful of people around that positive person. And I think people look at that gathering and think, ‘Oh my gosh, there was a positive person there so there’s 50 cases.’ And we just don’t see that.”

The team at the New River Health District says everyone’s focus needs to be taken off the numbers of cases and put towards their own behaviors for the betterment of public health.

“Again, we’re going to see numbers go up, but those numbers going up, we have to look at them in context,” Dr. Bissell said. “If we’re able to take these clusters and mitigate that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to shut everything down.”

More so than the total number of cases, Dr. Bissell said the death and hospitalization rates are more important to monitor. For the New River Valley, as of Wednesday, Aug. 19, those numbers were at 8 deaths and 33 hospitalizations.

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