By Laura Lydic
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Gov. Larry Hogan issued an executive order today to “clarify” that all students over the age of 5 are required to wear a face mask “in any area of a school setting where interaction with others is likely.”
The order, which was announced during a press conference this afternoon, covers classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, auditoriums, gymnasiums and any other area of a school building, the governor said.
Hogan said he has been working with state superintendents around the state to get students safely back in the classroom. He said his administration had submitted to the General Assembly a $1.5 billion supplemental budget request to provide additional support to schools, adding that the state has made more than 1 million COVID-19 tests and an unlimited supply of PPE available to every school system in Maryland.
The governor also noted that every school will or has plans to open in March.
“I’m looking forward to visiting school systems all across the state in the coming weeks to thank all teachers, staff and administrators who have been working so hard to get our kids back in the classroom,” Hogan said.
Hogan also warned Marylanders not to fall for fraudulent schemes in which a caller claiming to be from the state health department asks residents for credit card and Social Security information in order to receive a coronavirus vaccine.
Federal officials have filed criminal complaints against three Baltimore-area individuals allegedly involved in a scheme to sell COVID vaccines to unsuspecting resident, the governor said.
“I want to make this very clear,” Hogan said. “No one can sell you a vaccine, no one can charge you for a vaccine.” Vaccines are free and do not require insurance information or Social Security numbers, Hogan said.
“Anyone who attempts to prey on innocent people in this life-and-death crisis will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” the governor said.
During the press conference, Hogan said that although there has been a loss of more than 500,000 Americans and 7,580 Marylanders to COVID-19, there were significant improvements to the states’ coronavirus metrics, including a 58% drop in the positivity rate and a 76% drop in the case rate since December.
“Even as our key health metrics continue to decline, we remain concerned and are working very closely with CDC officials to monitor the new variants of the virus, which has reached our shores,” Hogan said.
The variants coming from Brazil, South Africa and the U.K. are not known to cause a more severe illness but are more contagious, a state health official said.
In an effort to monitor these variants, Maryland has partnered with the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University to double the surveillance sequencing volume to keep track of mutations of the virus in the state. By doing this, health officials said, Maryland will have one of the strongest surveillance sequencing in the world.
Dr. Jinlene Chan, the acting deputy secretary of public health services in the state health department, said there have been reported mutations of the virus since the start of the pandemic.
Chan said state has identified the b117 variant, which is also known as the U.K. variant, the b13.351 variant, which is the South African variant, and the p1 variant, which is the Brazilian variant.”
Chan credits these identified variants to the increase in sequencing efforts in the last couple of months. She also notes that there are now over 1,600 documented cases with variants across the United States. Most of the cases have the U.K. variant, 60 of which are here in Maryland.
Hogan said 1.1 million vaccines have been administered so far, 200,000 of which were administered in the last seven days. He said 99.6% of the doses the state received from the federal government have been administered.
The state is averaging 29,096 shots per day, which is more vaccines than the state is currently receiving, Hogan said. He said federal officials advised him and other governors today that the Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccination could be cleared by the FDA by next week.
Maryland’s mass vaccination sites are administering vaccines to residents of all 24 of the state’s jurisdictions. M&T Bank Stadium is opening as a mass vaccination site on Thursday. The site will have 300 personnel, including nurses, vaccinators, pharmacists and nurse practitioners.
The site will be able to administer 2,000 shots per day and will have the capacity to do thousands more as the vaccination supply increases, Hogan said.
There is a fourth vaccination site to be opened in Southern Maryland in the upcoming weeks. The site will be able to provide thousands of vaccinations. There will be mass vaccination sites on the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland added as well, state officials said.