COVID-19 in schools: Some parents are left in dark
Every time I get an automated call or email from my son’s school district, I fear it’s going to be bad news about the coronavirus.
I’m not alone. Most parents are nervous about outbreaks among students.
What would help is if we had a way to check how many students and staff have been sick since school started.
But that’s not easy — because the Pennsylvania Department of Health is not publishing data about COVID-19 cases for each district.
The department isn’t publishing those figures because a federal law prohibits releasing information about diseases contracted by a person or group of people, for privacy reasons, spokesman Nate Wardle told me.
No one wants to point a finger at someone who is infected. But with most schools and districts having hundreds or even thousands of students, I don’t see how publishing the caseload is going to violate anyone’s privacy.
The law isn’t preventing New York from sharing the data for each school district, by school. Gov. Andrew
Cuomo ordered the information to be published online.
The Pennsylvania Health Department previously cited that law as the reason it wasn’t releasing coronavirus counts for each nursing home, too. But it later relented amid public pressure as cases and deaths mounted in some facilities.
I hope it also reverses course regarding school district data. Parents deserve to have a central place to obtain that information, in case their districts aren’t releasing it, and so they can track totals over time and compare them to other districts.
For now, the department is publishing only statewide data for cases among
school-aged children.
Parents just have to hope their districts will be forthcoming about cases, and many have been. Some, including Bethlehem Area, are publishing the data on their websites. Bethlehem lists the number of cases among students and staff by school, by week. Breaking the data down by week is helpful because it allows parents to
identify trends, and not worry about old cases.
Investigating infections among students isn’t as easy as investigating them at nursing homes. A case at a nursing home can usually be presumed to have been contracted there, as most residents aren’t leaving the premises.
Students are mingling with family and friends outside of school, and may
be going to stores and restaurants or playing sports or other activities.
So determining whether a student was infected at school will be difficult, if not impossible. What’s important is determining whether they attended school while they may have been contagious.
It can be challenging to determine if a student who tested positive for the virus was contagious while at school, Wardle said, because some districts have in-person instruction only a few days a week.
The state Health Department — or county health department, if the county has one — is notified by the laboratory about each positive test and conducts a contact tracing investigation. If the investigation discovers a student may have been contagious when they attended class or participated in school-related activities, the district is notified so it can act.
Schools then are expected to follow their safety plan.
When that happens in Bethlehem, the district informs parents and also publishes the notice on its COVID-19 data dashboard.
The notice about a case at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School on Sept. 13 says the classrooms and spaces used by the individual were closed and cleaned, and staff and students who may have been in close proximity would be contacted by the district or Bethlehem health bureau and told to self-quarantine.
The district where I live, Daniel Boone Area in Berks County, has a similar process.
I got an email Monday about a student testing positive at the elementary school. The notice explained that the student had last attended school on Sept. 8 and rode on a school bus. The district said all students in the classroom were sent home, and those needing to quarantine would be notified and continue classes online. Quarantined staff would teach online.
Many families fortunately have options for educating their children during these trying times, and can choose to have them attend virtual classes instead of going in person.
We need information to make the best choice, though. The Health Department can help by providing that information.