As of Thursday, September 17, 2020, Montana reports 9,647 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 217 new cases reported in the last day: 61 in Yellowstone County, 34 in Rosebud County, 14 in Big Horn County and in Roosevelt County, 13 in Gallatin County and in Meagher County, 11 in Silver Bow County, 9 in Missoula County, 7 in Lake County, 6 in Custer and in Flathead Counties, 5 in Hill County, 3 in each of Dawson and Musselshell Counties, 2 in each of six more Montana counties: Carbon, Cascade, Glacier, Park, Pondera, and Toole Counties, and 1 in each of six more counties: Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Lewis & Clark, Ravalli, Sanders, and Wheatland Counties. Statewide, 549 people have been hospitalized, and one hundred seven people currently are being treated in Montana hospitals for COVID-19. Yellowstone County has had 2,677 cases so far. Gallatin County has had 1,179. The number of active coronavirus cases in Montana is 2,103. The most active cases are in Yellowstone County, with 810 active cases. Gallatin County has 47. 143 people have died in Montana of COVID-19. Nationwide, more than 197,000 Americans have died. There have been 6,650,000 cases of coronavirus in the US, and counting.

The Trump administration scrapped a plan to send every American a face mask in April, just a couple weeks in to the pandemic. The White House sent masks to nonprofit organizations and state and federal agencies instead. Public health experts said sending masks directly to Americans’ homes in the early days of the global pandemic would have sent a stronger message encouraging Americans to wear masks. Wearing masks protects the mask-wearers as well as those around them. A professor of medicine says, “It may even decrease the severity of disease that you get,” she said. “No country but this one has resisted masking.” As an example, face masks have been incredibly effective at curbing the rate of infection in Taiwan, where masks were immediately encouraged and distributed en masse throughout the country. As of June, Taiwan had just seven deaths from COVID-19.

Louisiana State University’s football coach said ‘most of our players have caught’ coronavirus, an alarming revelation that came just a day before the Big Ten Conference announced Wednesday it would return to the gridiron in the fall, reversing its earlier decision to suspend the college sport. Ed Orgeron, coach of the defending national champion LSU, casually dropped the disclosure while answering a question about the Southeastern Conference team’s depth during this pandemic. LSU isn’t the only team with coronavirus outbreaks and concerns. The University of Virginia was set to play at its backyard rival Virginia Tech this upcoming Saturday. But that highly anticipated grudge match had to postponed due to coronavirus concerns in Blacksburg.

Montana schools, universities, and county public health departments have inconsistently reported COVID-19 cases linked to educational institutions, so Montana officials are creating a database that will report those cases. The database will include how many students and staff have tested positive in schools larger than 50 students, and will generally note positive cases for schools with between 11 and 50 students. The database won’t have data for schools with 10 students or fewer. Positive cases have cropped up in schools and universities across Montana. Some K-12 schools have temporarily closed, then reopened, but no schools or universities have completely reversed in-person openings. That hasn’t held true across the nation. Several universities like Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina have reverted to online-only classes, and many K-12 urban districts started the school year with online-only classes. Preventing cases from spreading through schools is a pillar of in-person reopening plans for Montana. Great Falls High School faces one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in Montana, where 10 students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19, as have four others in the Great Falls school district. That’s led to extensive quarantine orders and has shuttered schools for two days.

As schools spend big on temperature check technology, experts warn: temperature checks won’t work. “In the context of schools, fever screening is a particularly bad idea,” said Katelyn Gostic, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago. Body temperature checks have emerged in recent months as one of the more advanced and passive coronavirus mitigation techniques, with tripods mounting infrared cameras now a common sight in the entrances of buildings. But epidemiologists caution that mass temperature screening systems do little to detect people infected with the coronavirus, and potentially make people less safe by giving the false impression that coronavirus is not present. Epidemiologist Gostic says, “Fever screening only works if you have a fever. And we know that a lot of infections in children and young people seem to be asymptomatic or mild enough that you might not have a fever for several days, even though you are contagious; or you might never develop a fever at all.”