Discussions

Over the past couple weeks there have been an increase of cases in my child’s school. There have been cases added to the map but we have not had any emails or notifications from the school division. Does anyone know why this is happening?

This has been an ongoing problem. There is an excellent parent-run/crowd sourced Twitter account that keeps track. I believe you can access even without a Twitter account.  
 
 
https://mobile.twitter.com/covidschool  
 
There's lots of speculation why this is. One problem seems to be that there is discrepancy between how school divisions differ in reporting between each other and vs public health.  
 
But it's a mess.

Which school are you referring to?

In the paper a couple weeks ago said that if the person was not in the school on the day(s) that person was contagious, they do not have to send out notifications.

That is stupid when the exposure was from school so it shouldn’t matter.  
 
I don’t want to name the particular school but I know our school is not the only one. I have friends who work in other schools who have said the same thing

Yeah, like it's said above, they are only required to provide notification if there's risk of exposure. Not all cases have exposure, and according to the government, kids don't catch Covid at school *insert eye roll*.  
 
I'll use the example of St. Augustine, because that's my kids' school and it currently has an outbreak in grade 6. I've gotten notification letters for a total of 5 (3 in grade 6, 1 in grade 4, 1 in grade 2) cases, and all but one letter has the statement "not believed to be acquired at school". The provincial map shows 9 cases so far.  
 
BUT... grade 6 has been on remote learning since Friday Oct 15, and close contacts of the index case have likely been home since the initial notification, which was Oct 10. The grades 2 and 4 cases are very possibly siblings for an infected student in grade 6, and I've been operating under that assumption. So it's very possible that there's cases associated with the school, but because those kids were not at school during the infectious period, no notification is "required" because there should no risk to the staff and students.  
 
I put "required" in quotes like that because there ARE school divisions, in the interest of transparency, that do advise on those types of cases. They class them as "no further action required".  
 
Now, even keeping this under advisement, the data is still a mess and there's lots of cases where there's letters sent out but they don't ever show up on the provincial dashboard, and vice-versa. The province had initially promised to report ALL cases in schools, and hasn't done a very good job of that, although I think it's improving somewhat with the introduction of the dashboard?  
 
I can report (edit to clarify: my observation has been...) that the absentee rate at St. Augustine seems to be quite high right now (unsurprisingly), but is improving. We were away for a week with a very bad cold (we had negative PCR tests x 7 people, one poor kid got tested x2), so that's also circulating simultaneously right now. So it's making things complicated.  
 
Edited by Abbysmum, 2021-10-19 19:37:40