The Valley News article “Coronavirus cases decline at Dartmouth, Jan. 19” buried the lede.
According to the Jan. 18 Dartmouth COVID-19 dashboard, 11% of Dartmouth community members — including 21% of undergrads — tested positive for COVID-19 during just the previous seven days.
An extremely high percentage of the campus had also tested positive during the previous week (8% of the total campus community tested positive during the week starting Jan. 2).
To Dartmouth’s considerable credit, we only know those numbers because it has been testing everyone weekly while reporting the results publicly. In contrast, most other local workplaces are left in the dark as to their own changing rates of infection and associated risks.
Also to Dartmouth’s credit, 98% of the Dartmouth campus is vaccinated. High vaccinations rates will substantially minimize the downstream burden of those infections on local hospitals while significantly reducing the death toll.
But still, those are quite astoundingly high numbers, all just from the few weeks since the start of the term. At least some of those infections are likely to spill over into the rest of the Upper Valley, perhaps especially as dining and socializing restrictions let up even while the rates of COVID-19 on campus are currently still so high.
That seems like a far more relevant way of framing the story in the Upper Valley than highlighting an apparent drop over the weekend in the more artificial context of active cases alone.
Deborah Brooks
Hanover
January is National Mentoring Month and, in honor of this annual occasion, I wanted to share some information about the benefits to kids of having a mentor.
The children of Windsor County need to get back to some sense of normalcy after almost two years of the pandemic. Connecting with a mentor can be a key element in this return to routine. The benefits of having a mentor are well-documented.
In Windsor County Mentors’ school-based and community-based mentoring programs, we train and certify mentors who are then matched with children either at a local school or in their community. Once matched, the pair meets weekly and, during their time together, mentor and mentee can partake in whatever activity they choose — having lunch together, completing school work, playing a game, exploring the world or just talking.
The reliable routine of mentoring allows children to build a relationship with their mentors built on honesty and trust over time. Mentors serve as a thought partner for students on their academic and life journeys and help empower them to become autonomous agents of their own change.
Strong social science research has shown that young people with mentors have:
■Increased high school graduation rates
■Higher college enrollment rates and higher educational aspirations
■Enhanced self-esteem and self-confidence
■Improved behavior, both at home and at school
■Stronger relationships with parents, teachers and peers
■Decreased likelihood of initiating drug and alcohol use
Mentoring has also been linked in studies to social and emotional development benefits, improvements in youth perceptions of parental relationships and better prospects for moving on to higher education.
Mentoring has lots of positive proven benefits for kids and we at Windsor County Mentors are proud to be able to support our local children.
Matthew Garcia
White River Junction
Strategically, it’s encouraging to see the brain trust of the Democratic Party investing in outsized, overweighted conspiracy theories in an attempt to further malign former president Trump and Republicans in general. They’ll surely be coming forth with any number of anonymous sources and hinting at collusion innuendo, plotting a military coup, high crimes and so on.
Over the past five years, the party has focused relentlessly on political machinations of their own design, favoring a Russian/Chinese style legal system where accusation equates with guilt, and they provide all the proof needed — absolutely none.
Apparently they have little to lose.
Richard Bircher
Lebanon