PARKERSBURG — As school started in the region in the past week, COVID numbers are rising with hundreds of students in quarantine and counties in the red on the County Alert System map.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Wood County Schools officials confirmed 801 students are in quarantine due to COVID-19 exposures.

On Monday evening, the Wood County Board of Education voted to require students and faculty to wear masks inside buildings and on buses while Wood County is orange or red on the County Alert System map; the county has to be gold or better on the map for five consecutive days for the requirement to be lifted.

The Wood County Schools website now has a COVID-19 dashboard which lists the number of positive cases among students and staff in each school. As of Tuesday afternoon, Wood County Schools has 97 positive cases. Parkersburg High School has the highest number of cases with 18.

Sunday afternoon, Calhoun County Superintendent Kelli Whytsell reported 200 students and four positive employees in quarantine in the county.

Pleasant Hill Elementary School students are doing remote learning through Sept. 9 and last week, Whytsell announced a mask mandate among all students and staff regardless of vaccination status as positive cases spiked five days after school started.

Within five days, around 50 students had to be quarantined.

“This mandate will be reevaluated on Sept. 16. The goal is to keep students and staff safe and in school. We cannot do this without masks at this time. We anticipated having to periodically issue a mask mandate,” Whytsell said. “I regret that we have to implement this so soon in the school year but we can’t keep quarantining large numbers of students and have a successful year.”

Those in quarantine and home doing remote learning will be able to pick up meals today from 1 to 2 p.m. at Calhoun Middle High School in a drive-through format.

Roane County Schools also implemented a COVID-19 dashboard on its website and it reported 92 students in quarantine; 43 students were exposed but do not need to quarantine as they are vaccinated, as of Tuesday morning.

The dashboard outlines which school had a positive case and whether the person was a student, visitor or faculty member. It lists the number of students and staff required to quarantine along with the number of students and staff who do not need to quarantine due to vaccination protection. Students and staff members who tested positive but have not been at school are not listed on the site. The Roane County dashboard will be updated weekly.

On Aug. 20, Roane County went into the red on the county map for the first time with 35 new cases reported in the span of seven days. As of Tuesday, Roane County has 130 active cases.