In March 2020, the whole world went into lockdown due to the rise of a new virus called COVID-19. It was mandatory to wear a mask for the majority of 2020. 

A little over a year later, the mask mandate was lifted for some places due to the vaccine being created. 

Since then, COVID-19 has been thought of as not a big deal to most. New strands and variants of the virus have spread, but still no mask mandates have re.

In August-September of 2023, reports of cases of COVID-19 were rapidly going up. 

The average on daily hospital admissions from October 7, 2023, was 4,050 with 975 deaths from October 1-7 in the United States. 

The first vaccines were primarily series doses of either a one or two-shot regimen. In the fall of 2021, the first booster shots arrived.

A year later, bivalent boosters were approved, which provides extra protection against the Omicron variants.   

COVID-19 has impacted Highlands High School in the past, but today there hasn’t been much of an outbreak as compared to the cases reported globally.  

District Nurse Rhonda Wassom said: “There has been very little of an uprising.” 

Wassom explained that people who feel sick are most likely to not test to return to school. 

 “I think people are much less likely to even test, so if they are feeling poorly they are staying home but they are not doing the Covid test because the symptoms are pretty minimal.” 

The policy used to be that if you were sick or out for a day, the only way to come back was to get a Covid test. 

If the test was positive, you had to be quarantined for 14 days. Now, you don’t have to have a test in order to return to school, but if you do have COVID-19, you have to quarantine for five days as long as you are feeling better. It is also encouraged to wear a mask five days after the return of your quarantine.  

“I think if we were going to see a rise in it with reportable cases we would have already been on the beginning of that because we are on the end of October.”