Frederica Freyberg:
Cases of COVID have been increasing since August and are expected to keep rising as cold weather brings people indoors. This as overall vaccine uptake continues to decline. State health officials are encouraging people to get the newest COVID and flu vaccines, but as for required vaccinations, more K-12 students are getting personal conviction waivers. A matter of concern as the vaccine rate for measles continues to fall well below what’s needed to prevent an outbreak.

Stephanie Schauer:
2024 has shown a number of measles outbreaks in the U.S. Most notably, our neighbors of Minnesota, are currently experiencing a measles outbreak. I think they have about 49 cases with at least 11 of them having been hospitalized. And the majority of these cases are occurring in unvaccinated children. So we do know that we’ve got pockets in our communities and in our schools that have much lower rates and could be ripe for, you know, an outbreak occurring if measles were introduced.