 Pikeville Medical Center is encouraging parents and caregivers to go ahead and make plans to prepare their kids for the upcoming school year. School is coming up. Everyone will need their physicals for school just the same as before. You know, if we go back to actual school, you will still have to have your immunizations. You will still have to have your physicals on record. So we need to go ahead and get those scheduled, get those done. Right now is a good time to get that done. Please don't try to wait till the very last minute. It's really hard to get in and get everything done at the last minute. Currently, if your child needs a physical this year, we advise you go ahead and call so we can assess when that physical needs to be done. If it's the right time, some people, they're not old enough yet for their sixth grade shots. So we might say, oh, in two weeks, you can come because in two weeks that you're old enough for your vaccines. Will says that even through this COVID-19 pandemic, there are many other diseases and illnesses they can prevent with the vaccine. We can't prevent COVID at this time by vaccine, but we can prevent other things that are very deadly. Pertussis is very deadly to the babies in particular. Okay. We need to vaccinate our older kids for pertussis to prevent them from spreading it to everyone else. We also need to vaccinate for strep pneumo and H flu and meningococcemia, which is very deadly and has been deadly before in our community. So it's just it's essential for everyone's safety that we try to keep our vaccines up to date. In general, we would like the primary caregiver to bring the child that is who's going to be most familiar with the child that could address whatever health issues are going on with the child. So we could take care of other routine health things while you're here for your visit. We only would usually encourage that someone else bring your child if it just wasn't even an option that you could bring your own child. According to Wells, many parents have canceled appointments in fear of coming into the hospital amid this pandemic. Most of them when they've came in have been pleasantly surprised though. They were very afraid to come and then once they did come, they felt for the most part very comfortable and felt like it was very well addressed and that we were being as safe as we possibly could be with their children. Making the decision on whether to send your kids to school this year will be different than previous years. We need to be very diligent about not sending people to school sick. You know, if you're a child of sick, this year is going to be even more important that you don't send your child to school. If you think your child might be sick, if you think you might be sick, then you need to be tested. Don't send your child on to school. Yes, they have a teacher there. That teacher is trying to get them to wash their hands to not cough, to do to clean everything as we go. But kids don't really understand. You know, you can tell them to cough into their arm, but if they're coughing, they probably just shouldn't be there. Reporting from Pikeville Medical Center, I'm Jeremy Justice with URMountantop News.