The long awaited COVID-19 vaccine is reportedly on its way.

On Nov. 9, Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech unveiled their preliminary results on a potential COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech followed up with an announcement on Nov. 18 that the vaccine is 95% effective with a consistent efficacy across age, race, and ethnicity demographics during its ongoing trials.

On Friday, the pair formally requested an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow a faster rollout of a vaccine to the American public.

Shortly after Pfizer and BioNTech reported their preliminary results, Moderna Inc. and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — which is part of the National Institutes of Health — announced on Nov. 17 that they had co-developed a second vaccine candidate with an efficacy of 94.5%.

Well before these announcements, though, Fairfax County health officials were preparing for the distribution and accessibility of a COVID-19 vaccine once one becomes available.

“We’re working on all of the logistics of getting the vaccine out,” said Dr. Benjamin Schwartz, the Fairfax County Health Department’s director of epidemiology and population health. “We’re working on communicating with our health care partners, health care providers, [and] health care organizations so that we can not only make sure we’re able to vaccinate them, but also if they want to deliver vaccine to their patients, that we can tell them how to do so.”

Schwartz says plans are still being made as the county and health department learn more about the two-dose vaccine and its availability in the coming weeks or months.

Though some plans will need to be finalized, Schwartz shared that a portion of the county’s plans will be to focus initially on priority groups that are most at risk for severe illness. Those groups include health care workers as well as residents and staff of nursing homes.

The county’s method for distribution will also take a variety of approaches, according to Schwartz. He detailed that the vaccine will be distributed in some cases by facility and, in others, by the local health department. He also said that some national chain pharmacies and private providers interested in vaccinating would be part of the distribution plans.

Those plans are contingent on the availability of a vaccine. The FDA has scheduled a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for Dec. 10 to discuss the EUA request from Pfizer and BioNTech, according to a press release from the FDA. Though the VRBPAC may provide advice to the FDA, the FDA will have the final decision on the pharmaceutical companies’ EUA request.

If the EUA request is approved, Pfizer has announced plans to distribute the vaccine as soon as possible in December.

“We will continue the work already underway to make sure we can begin shipping the vaccine immediately after authorization or approval,” Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla said in a video released by the company on Nov. 20. “Based on current projections, we expect to produce globally up to 50 million doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.”

According to Schwartz, once a vaccine is approved, its distribution would be a function of the federal government, which will decide how to allocate the vaccine to the states. The state health department would then allocate the vaccine to local health departments or jurisdictions.

“We’re still communicating and learning how that’s going to work,” Schwartz said. “We are in constant communication with the Virginia Department of Health and still obviously getting more information about how that’s going to occur.” Read More

Due to rising COVID-19 cases, Fairfax County Public Schools decided to delay bringing more students back for in-person learning this week after previously preparing to expand in-person instruction to an additional 6,800 students on Nov. 17.

In-person learning has continued this week for the roughly 8,000 students who had already returned to the classroom since early October.

FCPS Superintendent Scott Brabrand will hold a Return To School Town Hall today to discuss the decision and next steps. The town hall will take place virtually on the FCPS website from 6-7 p.m. Participants can submit questions to [email protected] or call in to 1-800-231-6359.

A second Spanish-language town hall has been scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 30.

The Fairfax Education Association, alongside other Northern Virginia education associations, has urged Gov. Ralph Northam to fully return to virtual learning. The association also wrote a letter to FCPS on Nov. 12 demanding virtual learning.

Gov. Northam, however, exempted educational settings from the 25-person limit on social gatherings that he imposed when tightening COVID-19 restrictions on Nov. 13.

Do you believe delaying the return of students is the right decision? Do you think FCPS should continue with its roll-out of hybrid learning or return to a completely virtual model?

Photo via FCPS 

Falls Church City Public Schools will revert to online-only classes for the shortened week leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday, FCCPS Superintendent Peter Noonan announced on Monday (Nov. 16).

Students already attending in-person classes at Mount Daniel Elementary School and Thomas Jefferson Elementary School will continue doing so, but the one day of in-person learning that had been scheduled for next week will instead be virtual for all students.

Athletics and other activities at Henderson Middle School and George Mason High School have been suspended for the week of Nov. 23 to 27, which was already truncated since Thanksgiving is on Nov. 26. FCCPS will also not provide daycare in any of its buildings that week.

“Today’s data we received from the Virginia Department of Health and Fairfax County Health District is not moving in a good direction,” Noonan said in a letter to families. “While we remain in the moderate category overall, we are continuing to see a rise in the NOVA region data and our home community.”

The five-school system joins its much larger Fairfax County counterpart in reevaluating its plans to provide in-person classes for students after seeing a steady rise in COVID-19 case rates both locally and statewide.

The City of Falls Church has not reported any new COVID-19 cases since it saw four on Nov. 11, but school officials are concerned by trends in Northern Virginia, including an average 7.6% test positivity rate across the region’s four health districts and a rate of 17.6 new cases per 100,000 people as of Nov. 16.

After closing its campuses on Mar. 13 when the novel coronavirus pandemic first hit the area, FCCPS has been phasing groups of students into a hybrid learning model with in-person and virtual instruction since approximately 80 special education and English-language-learning students returned on Oct. 6.

Kindergarten and third-grade students started hybrid learning on Nov. 10. Plans to start in-person classes for elementary school students in first, second, fourth, and fifth grades today were not affected by Noonan’s announcement about Thanksgiving week.

Unlike Fairfax County Public Schools, which reported its first outbreaks last week, FCCPS has not seen any outbreaks since starting in-person instruction, but as of Nov. 16, two staff members and one contractor have tested positive for COVID-19, according to the FCCPS COVID metrics dashboard.

Noonan says the city school system is currently planning to resume hybrid learning after the Thanksgiving break. He urged community members to follow public health guidelines, including avoiding travel unless absolutely necessary and limiting celebrations to household members.

“This temporary pause is vital for our collective school community,” Noonan said. “It provides time and space to ‘hunker down’ and stay in our family configurations to slow and stop the spread of COVID…If we all do our part, we will be able to continue to ‘dial-up’ and reopen schools.”

Photo via FCCPS/Facebook

Fairfax County recorded a massive jump of 400 COVID-19 cases today (Monday), up from 174 yesterday, due to a backlog in data reporting on the part of the Virginia Department of Health.

The Fairfax Health District added 1,366 cases over the past week for a seven-day average of 195.1 cases, the highest rate since the district saw an average of 197.7 cases over seven days on June 8.

Fairfax County also reported three deaths from COVID-19 over the past week, raising the county’s death toll to 625 people. The county has now reported 27,095 total cases, and 2,440 people have been hospitalized since the Fairfax Health District identified its first presumptive positive case in early March.

The Fairfax Health District currently has a total testing positivity rate of 8.3% out of 392,064 testing encounters, according to the VDH.

Because of the data reporting backlog, the 2,677 cases that the VDH reported today statewide are the most that Virginia has recorded in a single day at any point during the pandemic.

While Virginia’s COVID-19 infection rate remains one of the lowest in the U.S., the clear upward trend in cases that the state has seen over the past 90 days led Gov. Ralph Northam to tighten restrictions on social gatherings and businesses in an effort to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“While cases are not rising in Virginia as rapidly as in some other states, I do not intend to wait until they are,” Northam said when announcing the new measures on Nov. 13. “We are acting now to prevent this health crisis from getting worse.”

Effective as of midnight on Sunday (Nov. 15), the cap on public and private in-person gatherings has dropped from 250 people to 25. The revised executive order defines gatherings as indoor and outdoor parties, celebrations, and other social events, but the limit does not apply to educational settings.

Religious services can also have more than 25 people in attendance if they adhere to health and social distancing protocols, including having at least six feet of separation between individuals and practicing routine cleaning and disinfection of frequently-contacted surfaces.

A mask mandate requiring all individuals 10 and older to wear face coverings in indoor public settings that has been in place since May 29 has been expanded to include all individuals aged 5 and over.

Northam has also prohibited the on-site sale, consumption, and possession of alcohol after 10 p.m. in any restaurant, bar, or other food and beverage service establishment.

Finally, violations of social distancing, mask-wearing, and cleaning guidelines by essential retail businesses, including grocery stores and pharmacies, are now punishable by the state health department as Class One misdemeanors.

Photo via Governor of Virginia/Facebook, Virginia Department of Health

Fairfax County Public Schools administrators reaffirmed their commitment to bringing more students back for in-person learning during a Fairfax County School Board work session last night (Thursday), despite increasing levels of COVID-19 transmission in Northern Virginia.

After introducing more than 8,000 students to hybrid learning – which consists of two days of in-person instruction and two days of virtual instruction – over the past month, FCPS is preparing to welcome an additional 6,800 students back into classrooms on Nov. 17, Superintendent Scott Brabrand told the school board.

Under a newly revised timeline, another cohort of approximately 13,500 students, including first and second-graders as well as students with disabilities, will start hybrid learning on Dec. 8, a week later than previously proposed.

Students in grades three to six will now be phased in on Jan. 12 instead of Jan. 4. Middle and high school students are still scheduled to return on Jan. 26.

“As we make preparations for additional students and staff to return, we are very mindful of the national, state, and local COVID trends,” Brabrand said. “COVID remains a fluid situation, and I want to emphasize these are my recommendations as of today, this evening.”

For now, FCPS will forge ahead with its Return to School plan even as COVID-19 cases rise in Fairfax County at a rate not seen since early June and the public school system reports its first outbreaks of the pandemic.

According to FCPS, Justice High School in Falls Church and Woodson High School in Fairfax had outbreaks on Nov. 10 that involved staff members, but no students. An outbreak is defined as more than two cases of COVID-19 that are epidemiologically linked.

FCPS sent out letters reporting the outbreaks to the affected school communities and is working with the Fairfax County Health Department to support its contact tracing investigations.

“Those outbreaks are concerning to us, and we take that seriously,” FCPS Department of Special Services Assistant Superintendent Michelle Boyd said. “We’re following up on what may have contributed to the transmission in our schools.”

As of this morning, FCPS has recorded 192 COVID-19 cases since Sept. 8, including 28 cases involving students, though the vast majority of infected individuals have been employees. 40 cases have been reported just this week starting on Nov. 8.

The unions that represent FCPS educators have argued that the school system should halt its plans for bringing in more students. Read More

In what’s become a familiar storyline, the number of COVID-19 cases continues to climb in Fairfax County as the week of Nov. 8 saw the highest weekly average of cases since June 7.

The county also reported that 11 people died from COVID-19 on Oct. 7, the highest number of deaths reported in a single day since May 27, when 24 deaths were reported. For most of August and September, the number of deaths remained under five per day. In October, 13 deaths were reported throughout the whole month.

The county also reported 209 cases on Nov. 8, the most in a single day since a whopping 399 cases were reported in early June.

But the number of hospitalized patients has not significantly increased — which suggests that individuals who contract the coronavirus do not need major or critical care.

The Fairfax Health District is averaging more than 100 new cases per day, more than any time since mid-June, according to the county. A surge is not yet apparent.

“Based on the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) pandemic metrics dashboard, our community transmission level, which had been low since July, has increased to moderate. We must remain vigilant to return to low community transmission,” the county wrote in a statement on Nov. 5.

Case investigators have found hotspots of exposure at work sites, celebratory events and gatherings, and within households.

The county offered the following tips to avoid community transmission:

If someone in your household is ill, immediately take precautions such as wearing masks when in common areas, avoiding shared utensils, and staying 6 feet apart.  

Limit indoor social gatherings, and choose lower risk activities for holiday celebrations.  

Avoid travel as much as possible, particularly to areas of the U.S. experiencing surges of cases. For necessary travel, follow CDC’s guidance to lower risk of COVID-19.  

Photo via CDC on Unsplash, Virginia Department of Health

In anticipation of the upcoming holiday season, the Fairfax County Health Department released a set of guidelines with information on how to celebrate Thanksgiving safely. 

The county emphasized that it’s still vital to work to slow the spread of COVID-19 and that, despite the cold months and inevitable pandemic fatigue, community members should not let their guards down now. 

According to the guidelines, high-risk activities include:

• Going shopping in crowded stores just before, on, or after Thanksgiving
• Participating in or watching a crowded race
• Attending crowded parades
• Attending large indoor gatherings with people from outside your household 

Moderate-risk activities include:

• Having a small outdoor dinner with family and friends in your community
• Visiting pumpkin patches or orchards where people use hand sanitizer before touching produce, wearing masks is encouraged or enforced, and people can maintain social distancing
• Attending small outdoor sports events with safety precautions in place

Lower risk activities include:

• Having a small dinner with people who live in your household
• Having virtual dinner and sharing recipes with friends and family
• Preparing recipes for family and neighbors and delivering them in a way that doesn’t involve contact with others
• Shopping online the day after Thanksgiving, as opposed to in-person
• Watching sports events, parades, and movies from home

The county advised against participating in any in-person activities if you or anyone in your household has, or are showing, symptoms of COVID-19 and reiterated that traveling increases the chance of getting and spreading COVID-19.

The health department suggests following the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations on holiday gatherings to further lower risk. 

Photo via Fairfax County Emergency Information

With Covid-19 cases rising and cold and flu season on the horizon, schools must focus on common-sense cleaning and disinfecting practices if they want a safe return, the American Cleaning Institute says.

On Nov. 16, Fairfax County Public Schools will open in-person instruction for Early Head Start, pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and special-education students receiving intensive supports and attending center-based programs, according to an update sent to parents on Oct. 23. In-person cohort learning will begin on Nov. 30 for grades 1-2 and special-education students in career centers.

In partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the ACI is asking schools and families to encourage children to wash their hands with soap at school and at home. Hand hygiene is a foundational habit for slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus and seasonal illnesses like influenza, especially in schools.

“It’s so simple and so important, especially at schools, as they plan to reopen,” said Brian Sansoni, the Senior Vice President of Communication, Outreach and Membership at the American Cleaning Institute.

But among adults in the United States, hand-washing rates are down compared to the start of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the ACI. Parents play as big a role as schools in forming hand hygiene habits, Sansoni said.

“Kids see what parents do and don’t do,” he said. “Reinforcing habits at home is really important for setting examples.”

Schools must be extra diligent in communicating to parents the importance of hand-washing habits at home. Schools must also be hyper-vigilant in restocking soap and hand-sanitizer dispensers, and providing supervision and encouraging hand-washing before eating and after restroom use.

“Where the extra care is required, hopefully there is communication between parents and school staff,” Sansoni said.

Another common-sense practice is disinfecting high-touch hot-spots daily. These zones include desks, chairs, tables, countertops, knobs, light-switches, classroom electronics, toilets, and drinking fountains.

Coincidentally, the COVID-19 pandemic hit as the ACI was planning to revamp its Healthy Schools, Healthy People initiative, Sansoni said. This year, the institute was preparing to focus more on hand hygiene and cleaning as a way of reducing absenteeism caused by seasonal illnesses.

“Once we get past this, hopefully, we don’t take our foot off the pedal when it comes to common-sense hygiene,” Sansoni said. “The cold and flu happen every year, and there are countless school days lost due to infection among students and staff.”

Pre-pandemic, the ACI spoke with school nurses across the nation and learned that nurses, at the front lines of school health, face an uphill battle with hygiene education.

Some nurses were frustrated at the lack of soap and cleaning materials, Sansoni said. In other areas, nurses needed their school districts and systems to encourage everyone to exemplify good behaviors.

“They have a tough job,” Sansoni said. “They try to emphasize this year round.”

Photo via the CDC

Like many other parts of Virginia and the U.S., Fairfax County is seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases as the weather gets cooler.

The county has a rolling seven-day average of 133.9 cases as of Nov. 2, the highest since mid-June when an average of 137 cases was recorded on June 12.

After adding 937 cases over the past seven days starting on Oct. 27, including 167 new cases just on Nov. 2, Fairfax County now has a total of 24,642 COVID-19 cases and 2,317 hospitalizations.

The latest data from the Virginia Department of Health shows that the Fairfax Health District, which includes the cities of Fairfax and Falls Church as well as Fairfax County, now has a total of 620 COVID-19 deaths, with 605 deaths in Fairfax County, eight in Fairfax City, and seven in Falls Church.

Fairfax County’s case rate of 2,120 cases per 100,000 people is roughly in line with those of surrounding localities, surpassing Arlington (2,012) but remaining under the City of Alexandria (2,718) despite its significantly larger population.

Virginia’s northern region as a whole saw a steady upward trend in cases throughout October, but it has become more pronounced over the past week, when the region’s seven-day moving average rose from 234.3 cases on Oct. 25 to 322.3 cases today.

While that still falls far short of the 685.3 seven-day average recorded when the pandemic was peaking in Northern Virginia at the end of May, the upward trajectory reflects an overall surge in reported COVID-19 cases throughout Virginia.

The 1,306 seven-day moving average that Virginia reported today is the highest that the state has ever seen since the novel coronavirus first emerged in the Commonwealth in March.

The regional and statewide climb in COVID-19 cases will continue to draw scrutiny as Fairfax County Public Schools plans to bring more students back into physical classrooms throughout November.

FCPS started returning small cohorts of students to in-person instruction at the beginning of October, and students in early Head Start through second grade, along with students in special education and students with intensive support needs, are all tentatively scheduled to return to school by Nov. 30.

117 employees and 26 students have reported contracting COVID-19 to principals, program managers, or administrators since early September, according to a weekly COVID-19 case dashboard compiled by FCPS.

Because the case count is based on self-reporting, FCPS notes that the data “should be interpreted with caution…and may not be aligned to future epidemiological investigations.”

Staff Photo by Jay Westcott; image via Virginia Department of Health

Door-to-door greeting and candy distribution is a classic staple of Halloween night, but Fairfax County and health officials warn it might be one of the worst activities to do amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

There are alternative activities available, like a parade going to residential areas around Vienna and a Trunk or Treat activity in McLean. For those that do plan to trick or treat this year, there are several precautions the CDC recommended taking, including:

• Avoid direct contact with trick-or-treaters.
• Give out treats outdoors, if possible.
• Set up a station with individually bagged treats for kids to take.
• Wash hands before handling treats.
• Wear a mask.

Photo courtesy Anne B.