Some numbers on the state’s Covid-19 School Report Card may be clouding potential risks to students and teachers, according to one of the region's top infectious disease experts.
In Niagara Falls, for example, eight students at Maple Avenue Elementary School have tested positive for Covid-19. All of them attend school in person two days a week – but on the state report card, all of them are categorized as off-site.
When classes started this year, New York State rolled out the dashboard where parents, teachers and others can find out how many Covid-19 cases there have been in each school.
Every student, teacher and staff member who tests positive is categorized on the report card as being either on-site or off-site. Some students who test positive, though, are designated on the report card as being off-site, even though they are actually in school two days a week.
People are also reading…
“The difference of on-site or off-site has two ramifications. One, it provides information to parents who are worried about their children being exposed,” said Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University at Buffalo's Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
“The other ramification is that it tells us if there is a problem with ongoing transmission in the school.”
When a student in school a few days a week in a hybrid system tests positive, school leaders work with the county health department to determine whether the student was at school at any point during his or her infectious period.
If he or she were not, the student is considered off-site.
“We classify it according to the way the Department of Health tells us to. We don’t make that distinction on our own,” said Hamburg Superintendent Michael Cornell, who is president of the local superintendents’ organization.
In Erie County, a person’s infectious period is deemed to have begun two days prior to the onset of symptoms or, if a person is asymptomatic, two days prior to testing positive.
That’s in keeping with CDC guidelines. But that makes it difficult to determine with certainty when an asymptomatic person was infectious.
“You don’t know when they turned positive. Where are they in the infectious window?” Russo said.
That’s why, when UB reports its Covid-19 cases to the state, anyone who steps foot on campus at all is categorized as on campus, he said. So if a student takes any classes at all on campus, he or she is considered on campus.
“It seems to me if you wanted to be conservative about this, you would put all the hybrids as on-site,” Russo said.
That is what the state Health Department says should happen.
“Hybrid students are counted as ‘on-site,’ ” spokeswoman Jill Montag said in an email.
That includes any students “who are expected to be physically present or on school grounds in any capacity, including in person learning, hybrid learning, extracurricular activities, etc.,” she said.
But, when asked by a reporter to provide any memos or guidance that the state had given to schools on that point, she declined to do so.
And some schools say they have not been given any guidance by the state.
A student might attend school in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, for example.
“If a kid went home sick on Tuesday, I report that as them being in school,” Niagara Falls Superintendent Mark Laurrie said.
But if that student developed symptoms on Wednesday, that student would be reported as off-site, he said.
There’s no way to know for sure when a student started having symptoms, he noted.
“How will I ever know what day the kid got sick on?” Laurrie said.
Maple Avenue Elementary in Niagara Falls has been the only school in Erie and Niagara counties to close because of Covid-19, after a teacher there tested positive at the end of September. The reopening was delayed after two more employees tested positive.
About three weeks after the first staffer tested positive, it reopened.
Russo noted the state’s Covid-19 Report Card is valuable because it provides information to parents about cases in the schools.
But that’s not the only reason it’s important, he said.
“The whole purpose of having report cards is to know whether there's ongoing transmission in the school and, if so, to tamp it down,” Russo said. “It seems to me that if we are going to have a reporting system, it should be standardized and uniform across all venues.”
