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Forty-five percent of all Covid-19 clusters in North Carolina's middle and high schools since July have been among sports teams, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS). The state's department of health said it was seeing a "sharp increase" in clusters among sports teams. (Simon, 9/9)

More than a dozen Maine schools have reported COVID-19 outbreaks in the first few weeks of the new semester, highlighting the challenges of returning for in-person learning this fall as the virus surges here. They come as schools start to return for in-person learning five days a week during a recent COVID-19 surge that has seen daily cases here rising more than tenfold over the past two months. Schools from Freeport to Van Buren have required some students to quarantine in the first few weeks of classes due to infections among students or staff. (Piper, 9/9)

Yellowstone County Public Health Officer John Felton updated the public Thursday on the rapid rise in COVID-19 cases, citing numbers similar to the initial surge, including overflowing hospital capacity and an uptick of COVID cases in school-aged kids. An upward trend has continued since July and August when numbers began to climb after a relatively quiet summer. August brought 1,193 COVID cases, more than April, May, June and July combined, Felton said during a press conference in Billings. (Schabacker, 9/9)

When kids are hospitalized with COVID-19 in the pediatric intensive care unit, their families face restrictions on being with their child and feelings of isolation, said Jacob Ferrin, a registered nurse at Primary Children’s Hospital. “I’ve seen parents that have to sleep in the bathroom in the room,” Ferrin said Thursday in a virtual news conference. “...They’ll go a day or two or three with no sleep because of how intense the environment is.” And when hospitals are at 110% capacity during the coronavirus pandemic, “there’s no way ... that everything is being done as well as when it’s running at 75 or 80%, where it’s designed to run,” said Dr. Andrew Pavia, who joined Ferrin, and is chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah Health and director of hospital epidemiology at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital. (Jacobs, 9/9)

Kali Cook was running around her Bacliff home Monday, gleefully batting the fake red eyelashes her grandmother had given her for Labor Day. By 2 a.m., she had a fever. By morning she was gone. The 4-year old died of COVID-19 in her sleep Tuesday at 7 a.m., her mother Karra Harwood told the Chronicle.“It took her so fast,” Harwood said. The preschooler, a student at Bacliff’s Kenneth E. Little Elementary School, is the first child younger than 10 to die of COVID-19 in Galveston County. Health officials confirmed the death Thursday afternoon. (Mishanec, 9/9)

The Biden administration has awarded over $18 million in grants to expand students' access to health care and mental health support as the new school year takes off, according to new numbers shared with Axios. Both children's mental health and their utilization of mental health services worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, per research from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The return to in-person instruction could also lead to increased health risks depending on masking and vaccinations in the community. (Chen, 9/9)