By Scott Thomas

Austin ISD is following public health officials’ advice in our response to the omicron variant through continued use of masks, contact tracing, free testing for students and staff, and making vaccines widely available.

• There are no cases in Texas or even the U.S. for that matter, but public health officials believe it’s very likely to come.

Why it matters: After a recent downturn in cases, we were seeing an uptick before Thanksgiving break, and news of a new variant is the last thing anyone wanted to hear.

• Public health officials are still determining the transmissibility and severity of omicron. 
• They’re also evaluating data about if current vaccines are effective against this variant, making masks even more important. 

The good news: Our mask mandate helped us during the surge driven by the highly-transmissible Delta Variant with the lowest COVID positivity rate among all Central Texas school districts. 

• No matter how many letters of the Greek alphabet we go through, we’ll keep following the advice of our local and national public health agencies.

What you can do: Get boosted, vaccinate your kiddos, and wear that mask!

• Come to one of our vaccine clinics, where we've been able to vaccinate more than 1,000 students ages 5-11!