Covid-19 St. Joseph County Cases and how it’s Affecting Penn High School

As we know, schools in Indiana have been closed down due to the recent and known virus COVID-19. For now, we are taking online virtual classes through Google Meets and Zoom until September. But you may be wondering what will actually need to happen to be able to go back to school and do face to face learning.

According to St. Joseph County Health Department (Link), St. Joseph county needs to have 7 days or a week of 14 cases or less of COVID-19 for students to be allowed to go back to face to face learning. Thursday, August 20, there was a huge burst in cases because of Notre Dame student parties raising the number of cases from the ’20s and ’40s to ’70s and ’90s. And as of now, we are continuing to see these high number of cases caused by the Notre Dame students.

On Sunday, August 23 there were 19 new cases from the campus of Notre Dame alone. According to Dr. Fox who is a part of the St. Joseph Health Department states, “we see much transmission from Notre Dame students to the community at large.” He also states that he hasn’t talked to anyone from the district yet but he does believe that this all can be controlled.

With this all in mind it might be a little while longer until we go back to school if the amount of cases coming from Notre Dame goes down.