ADPH relaunches school COVID dashboard after ‘particularly bad’ week
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The Alabama Department of Public Health and State Department of Education relaunched a COVID-19 school dashboard today, which reports weekly positive cases among students and staff by district.
While the dashboard is still incomplete, with only one-third of school districts reporting numbers, it comes nearly two weeks before its announced debut of September 10 and will update every Thursday.
“It’s been a particularly bad week for Alabama schools and we’re seeing a huge increase in the number of cases for school-aged children,” said Dr. Scott Harris, state health officer, during a news conference today.
Read more: Alabama struggles to keep schools open amid delta COVID surge.
Read more: Much of Alabama’s current COVID surge is preventable, health officials said Friday.
Read more: Talladega is the first district to move to hybrid indefinitely; more could follow.
Harris reported 5,571 cases among school-aged children during the week of Aug. 16, a 700% increase compared to last year.
“We don’t necessarily know if those kids were in a classroom or contracted it in a classroom,” Harris said; some districts that recently returned to school may be reporting cases that children caught during summer programs or from family members.
But some districts, such as Pike County, said they have been able to trace cases to in-school spread.
The dashboard is currently only reporting 4,337 cases, with the difference likely coming from some of the largest districts – Jefferson County, Mobile County and Huntsville City – not yet reporting their cases on the ADPH site. The agency called this week’s update a and added they cannot verify the accuracy of the data collected.
In Jefferson County, which just began requiring masks, 545 students and staff, or 1.43% of the district’s population, reported positive cases during the same week, in the district’s dashboard. More than 2,740 students and staff had to quarantine, hampering operations.
Of the 52 school districts reporting cases to the dashboard, 28 have at least doubled their highest numbers from last school year.
Baldwin County currently reports the largest number of cases, with 640. Last school year, the most number of positive cases the district reported in one week was 124, according to an analysis from The Alabama Education Lab.
Read more Ed Lab: Most Alabama schools now require masks. Find your district’s policy.
The spike in cases is due to the highly contagious delta variant, which has led to the highest level of pediatric hospitalizations nationwide since the pandemic began, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Many schools are struggling now to keep open. We really want to keep the doors open. We really want to keep kids in school for face to face instruction,” said Harris.
An increase in cases and staffing shortages have already led some schools to shift to virtual. Chambers, Clay and Greene counties each sent home whole classes or schools in the last week. Winston County encouraged parents to keep students home in order to reduce the spread of the virus.
With no statewide mandate in place, local school districts are left to determine their own health and safety protocols. As a result, there have been disparities in how certain schools report cases, as well as in whether they’ll require masks or provide virtual options.
While local districts have to report positive cases to ADPH, they are not obligated to report that information to parents, although it’s recommended by the state’s health agency that they do.
Some districts are using school nurses to conduct contract tracing and notify close contacts of possible infection; some are sending home letters to entire classrooms if someone is known to have tested positive; some post their own district-level dashboards; and others are not reporting cases at all.
District participation in the school dashboard is mandated by the Alabama State Department of Education. ADPH will continue to report all positive cases in their COVID-19 Dashboard, listed by age in the data and surveillance tab, and is encouraging universal masking and social distancing in schools, as well as vaccination, if 12 years of age or older.
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