Health experts agree that quarantines work, but they also stress the importance of face-to-face learning for children’s development. Now, many communities are struggling to deal with the line between keeping schools open and keeping those potentially infectious people at home.
Additional layers of protection, such as vaccination, testing, and masking, may limit the need for quarantine, but those against it tend to back down.
Union County public schools in North Carolina announced Monday that they will stop implementing contact tracking and quarantine policies for students and asymptomatic or negative staff after exposure to Covid-19. Masks are optional in the school district.
Angie McCray, a district parent, told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Tuesday that the decision is “annoying and disappointing” and she is debating whether to send her first-grader back to class in person. McCray is a pharmacist who left work behind to teach his son at home last year; he doesn’t feel like doing it again, but he says he has to think about safety first.
“I am currently pregnant and concerned about the safety of my family,” McCray said. “We were very excited to go back to public school and be able to let her have a somewhat normal education, and the school board has just made decisions that are not logical and affect my family and so many families in the county.”
The spread of Covid-19 has created clutter and challenges for schools this year.
At least 44,556 students and staff have been quarantined in Florida’s major school districts since the start of the new school year.
Last week, a high school in Fulton County, Georgia, moved from face-to-face learning to remote learning, just one month after classes began, following an increase in Covid-19 cases.
Some schools across the country they offer remote instruction to quarantined or isolated students, but some parents and politicians, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are reluctant.
“I believe that quarantining healthy children will deprive these children of the opportunity to receive education,” DeSantis said in August. “Now maybe a parent would want a healthy child to be quarantined, if there’s an exposure, but I think it should be the parents’ choice.”
Experts disagree. Allowing people to choose if you want to quarantine it defeats the purpose of having one.
Doctor: Actions that “endanger” others should not be the choice of the parents
“If you’re trying to stop a disease going through a community that kills people who shouldn’t die, you really have to use quarantine,” Dr. Christoph Diasio, a pediatrician in North Carolina, told CNN.
“Deciding the color of shoes your child wears at school is perhaps a reasonable parental choice,” she added. “But when your action may endanger other people, I don’t think that’s in the realm of parental choice.”
Deciding not to quarantine a child who has been exposed to the virus can endanger other people, experts say.
“It’s not just about our child’s health. It’s about the health of the other children in the school,” said U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy, on CNN’s Brianna Keilar last month, in response to DeSantis’ comments.
Murthy said he is concerned about states trying to block evidence-based prevention measures.
“Science tells us that proven and real methods, such as contact tracking; such as insulation and quarantine, when required; such as improved ventilation; regular testing: these are all precautionary layers we can take to reduce risk. for our kids, ”Murthy said.
The well-known exhibition requires quarantine in schools
“Sick children should not be in school and children who have had a known exposure should be quarantined until we know for sure that they are not infected and, above all, that they are not infectious,” he said. dir Shira. Shafir, an associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, told CNN.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said pre-pandemic remote learning highlighted inequalities, aggravated mental health problems, and was detrimental to the education of all students. The group has advocated a safe return to face-to-face learning this school year, guided by safety measures, including quarantine.
“Quarantine is a key function of public health, especially in this disease, where people are infectious before they know they are sick,” Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the University’s College of Public Health, told CNN. of Nebraska.
The school guide to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that vaccinated people and vaccinated people with symptoms be quarantined if they have been in close contact with an infected person. This means that close contacts who are vaccinated and asymptomatic can continue to attend school as long as they are masked for 14 days or until they receive a negative test result, but no student under the age of 12 is currently vaccinated.
Close contacts who are not fully vaccinated should be referred for Covid-19 testing. Regardless of the test result, they should be quarantined at home for 14 days after exposure. Quarantine shortening options provide acceptable ten-day quarantine or seven-day quarantine alternatives, combined with testing and a negative test result.
According to local health authority guidelines, the CDC says the quarantine period can be reduced to 10 days without testing or to seven days with a negative test.
The CDC defines close contact as being within six feet of someone for a cumulative total of 15 minutes a day, although the agency points out an exception for students in K-12 classrooms, if students involved wear masks.
Transmitting without symptoms
Even a seemingly healthy child who is exposed to the virus can put other people at risk and increase the chances of the school closing, Khan noted.
“Unfortunately, one of the things we know about Covid-19 is that people can transmit the virus for a couple of days before they start to show symptoms,” Shafir said. “It becomes really important to turn quarantine, because by the time a child has symptoms of infection, it’s quite possible that they’ve already been infecting and exposing others.”
Shafir said quarantine measures can be used in combination with testing and isolation for infected people.
The CDC has cited research from North Carolina and Chicago showing safety measures, including quarantine and masking, that have helped schools keep Covid-19 transmission rates lower than in surrounding communities.
Increased risk as Delta spreads
The Delta variant is more than twice as contagious as previous Covid-19 variants, and some data suggest it may also cause more serious illnesses, the CDC warns.
“It’s one of the reasons we see children transmitting more often than with the ancestral strain,” Shafir said.
Children not only transmit this variant more easily; they get sick themselves, a fact that is reflected in a growing number of pediatric cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations in the US. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported more than 500,000 cases of Covid-19 among children in the past two weeks.
However, experts say face-to-face learning is important for children’s development, as long as it can be done safely.
“We need to keep children safe because, at the same time, we provide them with an education in a way that doesn’t impede them in e-learning,” Dr. Anthony Fauci recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper. .
Protective layers can avoid the need for quarantines
While quarantine may be a useful tool for responding to the spread of Covid-19 in schools, health experts say that when there are other preventative strategies, students are less likely to have to quarantine at all.
These strategies include masking, physical distancing, testing, improved ventilation, and vaccination for those eligible. The Covid-19 vaccine is currently available to anyone 12 years of age or older in the United States.
Unified Public Schools in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school district, requires vaccination of all eligible students by the end of the calendar year. Students who reject the vaccine will be able to participate in an online study learning program.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb recently issued an executive order to relax the quarantine requirement for students and staff who have close contact with coronavirus-positive people, but only in schools that fulfill mask mandates.
President Joe Biden asked governors last week to demand vaccination for all teachers and school staff and announced funding to increase testing in schools.
Regular testing can help ensure students don’t waste class time unnecessarily, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He described how a “permanence-proof” strategy, which schools in states like Illinois and Kentucky are trying this year, can help prevent entire classrooms from having to be quarantined.
“There’s a whole movement around designing protocols that allow kids to stay in school, even after a positive case is given,” Gottlieb said. “Instead of quarantining large cohorts of children, what you do is implement serial testing around the exhibit.”
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says the goal is to create a safe environment for children in schools, with masks and vaccines.
“One of the most important ways is to surround children with vaccinated people, if they are fit to be vaccinated — and that means teachers and school staff,” he said.
CNN’s Naomi Thomas, Virginia Langmaid, Jacqueline Howard and Hannah Sarisohn contributed to this report.