The county has a online dashboard with case rates by age groups, zip codes and schools. Mirsch said this is crucial data for schools in making big health decisions.

“Our six to 19-year-old cohort is really growing. The majority of those are in the older part of that cohort of age. We have not seen a lot of cases under the 10-year-old range and that’s kind of our role is talking through the data and making sure school districts not only see our overall numbers but also the rest of these trends,” said Mirsch.

With the flu season approaching, St. Louis County Public Health Nurse Sarah Miller said they are also working on prevention efforts.

“There’s going to be a big push for people to get immunized this year against the flu, even people who maybe were resistant before because any prevention that we can do in the frontend is going to be helpful,” said Miller.

Miller said they’re following recommendations from the Minnesota Department of Health and will help schools understand steps they need to take if an outbreak or COVID-19 case were to happen in the schools.

“We’re just going to ensure that they have the best information that they fully understand the protocol. We’re a resource for them that’s really our local public health role right now,” said Miller.

Douglas County Public Health is also working with schools on support and education on COVID-19, including education on the flu shot.

“We don’t need influenza on top of COVID right now and so that’s one of the best things that people can do is already be planning for that flu shot this year. If they don’t do it any other time this would be the year to do that,” said Douglas County Health Officer Kathy Ronchi.

Ronchi said they are helping local school districts developing plans to bring kids back into the school in the safest way possible during the health pandemic.

“We are helping so they know more about COVID, identifying symptoms and how to isolate a child who might become ill during the school day and having a place set up for them to go where they will be safe and cared for, but reducing risk to other children and to school staff,” said Ronchi.

Ronchi said there’s no ‘one size fits all’ scenario for the schools districts since they have different needs but are working on having consistency for every school district’s safety and health plans.

“We have three public health nurses and each of them are assigned to different schools. We can expect we’re going to have outbreaks and we will handle it. It’s going to take some time for people to adjust to the way that things will be done. We can expect cases to happen, but we can also expect kids to do really well. Young children, they seem to be handling the disease really well,” said Ronchi.