Indiana’s state health commissioner is confident that schools can safely reopen, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be free of COVID-19.
“I want to emphasize that having a case of COVID in a school should not be a cause for panic or a reason to close,” Dr. Kris Box said during Wednesday’s COVID-19 briefing. “It’s a reason to take action to prevent an outbreak, and we’ve been working with schools and local health departments to ensure they have the tools to do that.”
Box said there’s no single metric schools should look at when deciding whether or not to reopen. A community’s seven-day positivity rate is a starting point, but there are also other factors, like the amount of testing, the sources of the outbreaks, and numbers of emergency room visits.
Similarly, Box said there’s no specific number of COVID-19 cases that should trigger a school closure. Instead, schools should look at whether the cases are limited to one classroom or spread throughout an entire school.
Even though there are far more cases now than when school buildings closed in March, Box said the situation is different. “We shut things down in March to prevent a surge that would overwhelm our health care system,” Box explained. “That allowed us to build the infrastructure for testing and secure the needed ICU beds, vents, and PPE, to ensure our hospitals could manage the outbreak for the long term. We were successful in those efforts.”
Box said she had expected to see COVID-19 cases show up quickly in schools, due to the recent increases in positive cases in younger people, specifically high-school-age students. “And it really makes sense, right? Because they’re the ones that are out and probably not socially-distanced, and they may be sharing a lot of different germs together in different ways, whether that’s their e-cigarettes, God forbid, or a Solo cup with their diet pop in it or, you know, other things that teenagers tend to share,” Box said
She added that while she understands the fear that students and teachers may have in returning to the classroom, having an in-person option is important for many kids, “Those children that don’t have the ability to really have the help they need to do eLearning at home, that may have safety issues because they’re six, seven, eight, whatever, 10 years old and may be actually left home because they’re not going to school, and those individuals that don’t have food security and the mental health and the behavioral issues that we’ve seen.”
Box said everyone can help slow the spread of COVID-19 in schools by wearing a mask, washing their hands, and staying home if they’re sick or have been in close contact with someone who’s tested positive. She asks parents to screen their kids for symptoms every day before they go to school.
