Yesterday the Mayor and the NYC Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi held a press conference to announce revised safety protocols for NYC schools, with weakened quarantining requirements. Instead, kids ill be sent home with testing kits if they were in close contact with a Covid positive classmate or teacher, and unless they test positive on day 1 and/or on day 5, they can continue to attend school.
They also said that they will double the amount of random Covid testing in the schools (ostensibly 10% of students weekly at each school, to be increased to 20%; though the actual number of students is often far less given that families have to opt into rather than opt out of testing).
For more on the new protocols, see the DOE letter to parents here, and articles in Gothamist and Chalkbeat.
During the presser and afterwards on twitter, Dr. Chokshi repeated the claim that more rigorous measures were not necessary, including testing students more frequently or before the resumption of school next week, as some experts have advised, since they had found in-school transmission to be extremely low: "Even if the rates were to become somewhat higher due to Omicron becoming dominant, we estimate that, in schools, about 98% of close contacts do not end up developing COVID-19."
I received the document below that City Hall is using to back up this 98% figure, prepared by Dr. Jay Varma, the Mayor's Senior Advisor for Public Health.
Some quick observations:
- I
don’t see the figure 98% cited anywhere.
- The time period covered, October – December 2021, is mostly pre-Omicron and thus of doubtful relevance to current conditions in which this far more infectious variant prevails. In fact, the document is entitled, "Interim Report on COVID-19 Transmission due to Delta Variant in New York City Public Schools."
- Since the DOE Situation Room has been dysfunctional, especially in recent
weeks, overwhelmed by the sharp rise in Covid cases in schools according to many accounts, it is unclear how much tracking and tracing the city has managed to do that could accurately estimate how much in-school transmission has actually occurred.
If you have additional thoughts, please leave your comments/observations below the document. Thanks!
In my experience, less than 20% of close contacts ever get tested so yeah these numbers are sus as the kids say. Kids in general aren't getting tested after exposure. True in my extensive personal and professional experience.
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ReplyDeleteI am a NYC Principal who, for obvious reasons, will remain anonymous. The claim that 98% of close contacts do not test positive for COVID is an invalid claim, particularly now as we have seen the breakdown in the last two weeks of the Situation room.
When a positive case has arisen in the past two weeks (since week of 12/13/21), principals were the identifier of close contacts. These close contacts were not reported to the situation room because they were not responding to case calls (phone was busy) and they also accepted email notification of positive cases which didn't require us to share close contact information. Therefore, how would DOE or NYC DOH know if close contacts tested positive since they don't know who the close contacts are?
I previously saw a comment on the CSD6 parent listserv that said the DOE is relying on parents to report their child's infection to it. WHich struck me as absurd. But I have not seen it elsewhere.
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