Medical officials raise alarms about schools
Fort Bend ISD officials should plan ahead for the potential of extensive COVID-19 outbreaks when schools reopen, a panel of medical officials that included Fort Bend County Health and Human Services Director Dr. Jacqueline Minter told trustees this week.
Minter said it was likely the schools would have a situation similar to the area day cares.
“When the day cares opened, immediately we saw (infection) clusters. Currently, we have about 32 outbreaks we have logged,” Minter said during a virtual board meeting Monday. She told trustees each day care had to quarantine entire classrooms and teachers for 14 days. Even worse, five Fort Bend County day cares had to close the entire facilities because of extensive outbreaks.
“With the level of disease that we have in our community currently, it’s a given that (outbreaks) are going to occur,” she said.
Dr. Kabir Rezvankhoo of Houston Methodist Specialty Physician Group in Sugar Land said he did a walk-through of Anne Sullivan Elementary School to evaluate infection control measures.
“There is much that needs to be fixed for you to be able to open the school,” he said and talked about the changes hospitals had to make to their facilities for infection control.
“You can’t just have this laissez faire plan for these schools especially when we’re in this hot pocket area of COVID-19 infections,” he said. As a scientific measure, Rezvankhoo recommended using the point when there was the lowest positivity rate in the community as the time frame goal and then opening up schools very slowly.
When asked about the proper safety measures, Dr. Sapna Singh of Texas Children's Pediatrics in Sugar Land said testing kits for children are in limited supply and the results for any kind of testing currently could take weeks, which creates unsafe conditions for reopening schools. She also voiced concerns about limited hospital capacity in the area and limited ability for contact tracing.
“At this time with this amount of uncontrolled community spread, there’s no amount of hand sanitizer, masking up, isolating, social distancing, temperature checks, screening at the front door that can prevent a teacher who is asymptomatic, who does not know they’ve been exposed, from coming into a classroom and potentially developing symptoms two or three days from now,” she said and urged district officials to plan ahead for outbreaks.
“As a pediatrician and a mom, I want everybody’s children back (in school), but we cannot do that without knowing that we do it in a way that’s safe and that we’re equipped to handle the consequences of getting the kids back in the schools and the teachers and staff that will go with them.
“This virus has created a situation of having no symptoms to being on a ventilator and dying within two days,” she warned.
Fort Bend ISD students will return to school for online classes for the first four weeks starting Aug. 12 with the option for trustees to approve another four weeks if the number of COVID-19 infections remain high, Superintendent Charles Dupre told trustees.