Good News for Schools: Kids Are Back and COVID Rates Aren’t Rising

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Teacher Megan DiToro offers hand sanitizer to a student at Nativity of Our Lord School in Warminster.Image via Alejandro A. Alvarez, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s been a month or more since the new school year started with some kids back in class. So far, there’s no sign the coronavirus is spreading in the schools, writes Maddie Hanna for The Philadelphia Inqurier.

Record keeping, however, is dodgy. There’s a wide variation in how states, counties and districts report COVID in schools.

At Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield Township, parents were told last week that a Delaware County Intermediate Unit staffer and an employee at the school both tested positive.

Health officials agreed no one else needed to be tested or quarantined “as there was no evidence of exposure.”

Locally, some virus transmission has taken place in schools but data is still pending, according to Chester County health director Jeanne Casner, who monitors COVID cases for Delaware and Chester counties.

Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, has created COVID Explained, a national COVID-19 School Response Dashboard.

While she describes COVID reporting nationwide as a “hodge-podey mess” she did say early signs are good that schools are containing the virus.

“Schools do not, in fact, appear to be a major spreader of COVID-19,” she wrote in the Atlantic.

Read more about reporting COIVID-19 cases in schools in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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