Teachers want access to data on COVID-19 in schools

VANCOUVER — Parents and educators are anxious about no longer receiving notices about COVID-19 exposure in schools even as the number of overall cases in the province is expected to rise this fall, the head of the B.C. Teachers Federation said Monday.

Teri Mooring said previous notices weren’t perfect because they didn’t state how many cases of the virus were circulating, but at least they provided some indication about what was happening in schools.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has said the notices created anxiety for parents, but Mooring said not having that information is creating more stress.

“I think the rationale about exposure notifications is a little bit insulting, in that they just created anxiety,” Mooring said, adding a large number of the notices in Surrey, for example, highlighted that school district as a COVID-19 hot spot last year, prompting many teachers to quickly get vaccinated.

Mooring said while notices will only be issued to those who are directly affected, others would also now be concerned about potential exposure to the highly transmissible Delta variant, which wasn’t dominant during the last school year.

She called for reliable data on exposure and case numbers in schools to be publicly available on the B.C. Centre for Disease Control website, the same as how case counts in all health regions are reported.

The absence of reliable data will only lead others to try and compile their own information, Mooring said.

Last September, a group of parents started an online “COVID tracker” page based on information submitted by teachers and citizens who reported at least one case of the virus in both public and independent schools. Some parents complained that the province should be providing that information so they could decide whether to educate their children remotely.

Henry recently presented modelling data showing new COVID-19 cases could exceed 1,000 a day by the end of the month and that high vaccination rates in the community would help protect students.

Sabrina Bharaj, whose children are in kindergarten, Grade 5 and Grade 7, said she’s concerned about the high number of unvaccinated people based on thousands of anti-vaccination protesters who showed up outside Vancouver General Hospital and other health-care facilities around the province last week. “It’s terrifying,” she said, adding the lack of exposure notices and lack of a mask mandate for kindergarten-to-Grade 3 students don’t help.