A key strategy in containing coronavirus is accurately identifying those individuals who have had significant exposure to the virus and sending them home to quarantine.
As schools across Louisiana reopen after five months of being shuttered, they are struggling to translate this simple idea to the complexity of a working school building.
Fine details can separate cases where just one person — the person infected — has to stay away from school versus ones where officials are forced the close the doors of a classroom, or even a whole school building.
At the same, some parents and employees worry about the risk with any infection on a school campus, no matter how limited the exposure.
“It is case by case. Sometimes it’s a challenge to communicate that to the public,” said Assistant State Health Officer Dr. Joseph Kanter. “We want things to be nice and packaged, but there is room for judgment here.”
If a student or school employee tests positive for coronavirus, who should be told? The whole school? Only those who are most affected? Or is …
Those who are significantly exposed to coronavirus are known as close contacts.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a close contact as anyone who has been within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes during the 48 hours prior to them becoming sick or being tested for the disease.
Louisiana also considers people in close contact if they had direct contact with someone with the disease, such as touching, hugging, kissing and sharing utensils. In that vein, close contacts also include those who’ve been sneezed or coughed on, or been touched by respiratory droplets from an infected person.
Close contacts, once identified, must then spend 14 days quarantined at home.
In many cases, the only people notified about a COVID-19 case on a school campus are those close contacts. Some schools on their own have opted to notify a wider circle of individuals.
State leaders plan to provide greater public disclosure of positive coronavirus cases at K-12 schools across Louisiana by creating a disease s…
State leaders last week announced plans to create a disease surveillance system to provide greater public disclosure of positive coronavirus cases at K-12 schools across Louisiana.
Louisiana tracks outbreaks it’s been able to trace to workplaces and events. The state defines an outbreak as “two or more cases among unrelated individuals that have visited a site within a 14-day time period.”
In its latest report, only five outbreaks were traced to K-12 schools, producing just 26 cases. By contrast, the state has traced 51 outbreaks to industrial settings, producing 364 cases. Food processors have been implicated in just 24 outbreaks, but they those outbreaks have produced the most cases, 591 in all.
Schools have adopted a range of strategies to try to curtail potential exposure, including social distancing, capacity limits and required mask-wearing.
The success of those strategies depends on how seriously schools follow them.
One of Kanter’s roles is serving as the medical director for the New Orleans-based Region 1.
As part of that job, he fields calls daily from school leaders trying to decide which students and employees they need to quarantine, or whether they need to go further and send an entire class, or even an entire school home.
“We don’t walk around in general with a yardstick and stopwatch, so there is always some judgment,” Kanter said.
Schools that have impeccable protocols on limiting the spread of the virus are best situated to avoid class and school closure, Kanter said. They may even be able to avoid having to quarantine anyone other than the infected individual.
“It doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to have zero (close contacts),” Kanter said. “But what it does allow is much less quarantining of classes.”
Conversely, schools that have less of a handle on their safety measures will likely have more close contacts and be forced to take more-drastic action.
“The less confident we are, the more likely we are to recommend quarantines,” Kanter said.
To help educators sort out what to do, the Louisiana Department of Education has teamed with Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Hospital staff set up an educator hotline and are conducting a series of webinars delving into detailed questions.
Dr. Leron Finger, chief quality officer for the hospital, is the main speaker at many of these webinars.
Schools that do more to space out chairs in classrooms, maintain strict social distancing, require face masks, and have leaders making sure rules are followed are doing the best, he said.
“All of these things, they are not just additive, they are exponential and multiplicative,” he said at a webinar held Tuesday, the most recent.
At an Aug. 13 webinar, Finger said a couple of schools that were lax in making sure rules were followed suffered outbreaks of “one or two dozen students” that could have been far smaller.
“I know it’s challenging but if it’s done well and to a tee there probably doesn’t need to be one to two dozen close contacts with every identified case on the campus,” Finger said. “It can be hard, and it’s going to be a learning process.”
At the most recent webinar, Finger explained that it’s not just consecutive minutes of exposure to someone infected that might lead someone to be deemed a close contact, but cumulative close contact over a two-day period. People who are in close contact for minutes at a time repeatedly, even if no one encounter lasts 15 minutes, could be deemed a close contact.
“It’s different if you walk past someone in the hallway 15 times versus if you have seven minutes of very close face-to-face contact three or four times over the day and that student ends up being positive two days later,” Finger said.
Finger said the bias is to “err on the side of caution” in such instances and send people into quarantine when there is a doubt.
“A lot of this is nebulous because there’s not a lot of science about it,” he acknowledged.
Kanter said school officials are the ones making the initial call in identifying close contacts and instituting quarantine measures, but except in the most clear-cut cases they should consult folks like him first before taking action.
”By and large, schools have been very cooperative,” he said. “Schools want to get into operation and stay in operation, and the only way to do that is to have good mitigation measures in place."
Kanter has a stick which he has not yet needed to use if a school is doing things that put people at risk.
“A state health officer has the ability to close a school,” he said.
Kanter said it’s impossible to keep COVID-19 completely out of school buildings given its community spread in Louisiana, but schools have tools to greatly limit its chances of spreading on campus.
“There will be exposures at the school just because of the level of exposure in the community,” he said. “There are going to be fits and starts.”
"try" - Google News
August 24, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/3l9o96d
How close is close contact? Louisiana schools try to figure out who is exposed - The Advocate
"try" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3b52l6K
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How close is close contact? Louisiana schools try to figure out who is exposed - The Advocate"
Post a Comment