Schools report 1,200 infections among students, staff
Schools across New York have reported at least 1,200 students, teachers and staff have tested positive for the coronavirus since the start of the academic year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday, though that number is almost certainly an undercount.
As of Tuesday, 693 public and private schools had at least one infection since classes started resuming in early September, according to state health data. Over 700 students and 400 school staff have tested positive for the virus.
No i nformation was available on whether the sick students had any opportunity to infect other members of their school community, or whether they had even returned to in-person learning before they tested positive.
State officials noted the count doesn’t capture the full extent of infections among either schoolchildren or teachers.
A separate, more comprehensive data collection system operated by state health officials that pulls test results straight from laboratories documented just under 2,300 infections among children aged 5 to 17 across the state between Sept. 1 and Tuesday, according to data released to The Associated Press.
That’s more than triple the number of infections among school-aged children that schools have reported, a discrepancy due partly to the data covering a longer time period. New York City’s schools, for example, didn’t reopen, even for remote learning, until the middle of the month and there was no standard system for parents there to report illnesses to school officials until the past few days, when people began returning to in-person learning.
The state is publicizing both sets of numbers on its online COVID-19 Report Card for school districts.
“It will not always match up perfectly, because sometimes when the school district reports and when the lab reports there might be a slight lag, but the goal here really is to give parents and New Yorkers full transparency,” said Gareth Rhodes, an aide to Cuomo, last week.
New York has about 4,400 public schools and 351 charter schools serving 2.6 million students. Several hundred thousand more attend private schools.