RELATIVELY SAFE
Health adviser downplays COVID danger in schools
City schools’ COVID-19 infection rate has ticked up since classrooms partly reopened in September, but top health officials say classrooms are still as safe as or safer than the rest of the city.
Citywide, more than 9% of people taking COVID tests were positive early this month. That’s much higher than the 1% rate that prevailed through much of last fall.
But Jay Varma, the mayor’s chief health adviser and architect of the city’s school COVID-19 plan, says the rise in positive tests is not now a worry for schools.
“When you look at what the prevalence is in the city, you find that the prevalence for people attending school, staff or students, is either the same or less than what it is for the city,” Varma told the Daily News.
Some recent studies suggest that in-person schooling may contribute to increased COVID-19 numbers when community spread is already high.
Surging cases citywide have also put new strain on the school safety protocols. More than 400 school buildings temporarily closed because of two or more unlinked COVID-19 case since early December, according to city data.
Despite the rising number of COVID-19 cases, Mayor de Blasio is holding firm on plans to keep at least a portion of the school system open for in-person learning for the remainder of the year, calling classrooms “the safest places in New York City.”
Educators could start getting vaccinated as early as this week.
Gov. Cuomo also won’t interfere, after reversing a rule last week that would have required school districts to shut down when community test positivity rates hit 9% by state measurements, which differ from city measurements.
Varma explained that city officials consider two metrics to assess the risk of COVID-19 infection in schools: prevalence, which measures the actual percentage of the population infected, and incidence, which refers to the number of new cases over a certain time period.
In order for schools to remain open, the rates of both prevalence and incidence in schools should be similar to or lower than the those in the surrounding community, Varma said.
Officials measure the prevalence of the virus in schools through the mandatory schools testing pprogram, in wwhich 20% of sstudents and sstaff at each sschool building are tested each wweek.
Comparing tthe school test ppositivity rate tto the citywide ppositivity rate “is not a perffectly fair compparison,” Varmma said. In his vview, the citywwide positivity rater is higher than the actual prevalence of COVID-19, since it only measures the disease in people who have taken tests.
Because of that problem, health officials use the citywide positivity rate to make an estimate of COVID-19 s actual prevalence in a particular group of people, Varma explained.
Such an analysis of data in October and November showed that the prevalence of the disease among people in schools was equal to or lower than the estimated prevalence citywide, Varma said.
The same was found for school incidence — which is calculated adding up the total number of new cases discovered through testing in and out of schools each week, and comparing it to new cases for the matching age groups citywide over the same time period.
However, officials declined to share the data on which they based their October and November analysis.
An analysis of school data from December — when community spread was much higher — is still underway, Varma said.
But a rough look at the numbers suggests that, at least for prevalence, rates remained lower in schools than citywide, he said.
The positivity rate from random school testing in December was 0.67%, de Blasio said recently, a marked increase from the 0.28% rate from October and November.
City officials are reconsidering some of their protocols for shuttering individual schools with the surge in cases.
“It is very disruptive to close all the time,” Varma said.
Officials recently reduced schools’ mandatory temporary closure time for multiple COVID-19 cases from 14 to 10 days. Varma said that shift was based on “an exhaustive review of the data” which found that “a 10-day quarantine is actually a much more effective balance between the risk of disease occurring and also the nature of quarantine and how restrictive it is.”
Varma said officials don’t have enough evidence to loosen a rule that requires schools to shut when two or more unlinked COVID cases are reported within the same week.
But he signaled that city officials will likely reconsider the requirement when community spread begins declining.