UUSD to publish its dashboard of cases

Ukiah Unified School District officials announced Friday that it created a dashboard for reporting all cases of Covid-19 related to “school sites and offices.”

“We want to be transparent about our efforts to keep schools Covid-19 free, so we created the UUSD Covid-19 Dashboard,” a Friday press release states. “We will post all positive Covid-19 incidents related to Ukiah Unified school sites and offices to this page. For the purposes of this dashboard, UUSD is distinguishing between school-based cases and community-based cases. Each positive case of students or staff members that have been on campus 10 days prior to testing positive for Covid-19 will be reported weekly in this dashboard. Contact tracing will be conducted, and each case will be classified as described below.

• School-based Cases: If contact tracing determines that the positive Covid case may have been contracted at the school site, it will be reported as “SchoolBased”

• Community-based Cases: If contact tracing determines that the positive Covid case may have been contracted outside of school, it will be reported as “Community-based”

• Undetermined: If contact tracing does not determine the source of exposure, it will be reported as “Undetermined”

As of Friday, Feb. 26, the UUSD dashboard was reporting one case of Covid, described as being “community-based,” related to Nokomis Elementary School and within the week of Feb. 8 through Feb. 11.

The school district also reported Friday that it will begin student Covid-19 testing next week. The release explains that “students will swab their own noses under guidance from District staff. You will need to know the Student ID for each child to sign them up. The COVID-19 tests we are administering are the 15-minute rapid antigen tests. Please call your child’s school site for questions about student IDS, and when, where, and how often testing will happen.

For questions about the test, please contact Ukiah Unified Communications Officer Doug Shald at 707472-5005 or dshald@uusd. net. Register for testing here: https://www.primarybio.com/a/uusd

The school district also notes that “schools are now eligible to open on the first day a county is in the Red Tier. If our current trends continue, we have set a projected in-person opening date of March 15 for grades 7 — 12 with Hybrid Learning. Of course, this depends on local health conditions, which we know can change quickly. Please make sure you are quickly responding to the information our secondary schools are sending out.”