School Report Card: L.A. schools will require students to get COVID-19 vaccine, Oklahoma's loosened school quarantine policy alarms experts
Students are headed back to class amid the coronavirus pandemic, and to keep you posted on what’s unfolding throughout U.S. schools — K-12 as well as colleges — Yahoo Life is running a weekly wrap-up featuring news bites, interviews and updates on the ever-unfolding situation.
CDC: Children ages 10 and younger have lower reported rates of COVID-19 than older Americans
Reported cases of COVID-19 in children aged 10 and under are “consistently lower” than other age groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The report analyzed data from 2,871,828 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 in children, teens and young adults, aged zero to 24, between March 1 and Dec. 12, 2020.
Among those confirmed cases, the majority — 57.4 percent — happened in young adults between the ages of 18 and 24. Here’s the rest of the breakdown:
14- to 17-year-olds: 16.3 percent
11- to 13-year-olds: 7.9 percent
5- to 10-year-olds: 10.9 percent
0- to 4-year-olds: 7.4 percent
Weekly testing among children, teens and young adults also increased more than 423 percent from May 31 to Dec. 6.
Among children, teens and young adults with available data on the severity of their illness, 2.5 percent were hospitalized with the virus, 0.8 percent required ICU admission, and 0.1 percent died, compared with 16.6 percent, 8.6 percent, and 5 percent among adults 25 and up.
But it’s important for people not to misinterpret the data as saying that children 10 and under are less likely to contract the virus, Dr. Lawrence C. Kleinman, survey/data core director at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, tells Yahoo Life. “These are reported cases,” he says. “Kids are much less likely to have symptoms of the virus and therefore are much less likely to be identified.”
“We know that kids get the virus and kids transmit it,” Kleinman says. “There does not seem to be a fundamental, biological reason why kids would get it less. The likelihood is we’re detecting it less.”
Schools in Los Angeles will require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 once the vaccine is available to them
Currently, vaccines to protect against COVID-19 are not authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to be given to children. (The reason: The vaccine hasn’t been tested on them in clinical trials.) Now, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest public school system in California, says students will be required to be vaccinated against the virus once the vaccine becomes available to them.
Superintendent Austin Beutner said during a recorded briefing that the COVID-19 vaccine requirement would be “no different than students who are vaccinated for measles or mumps,” Beutner said in a pre-recorded briefing. He also compared students, staff and others getting a COVID-19 vaccine to those who “are tested for tuberculosis before they come on campus. That’s the best way we know to keep all on a campus safe.”
Currently, one in three Los Angeles County residents has tested positive for COVID-19, according to new estimates by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
Anthony Aguilar, chief of special education, equity and access at the Los Angeles Unified School District later clarified in a letter to the editor to the L.A. Times that administrators “fully anticipate” having students back on campus before vaccines are available to children. “There is no vaccine currently approved for children, so the actual vaccination of students is likely a ways off,” he wrote.
There is precedence for this: Many school districts require that students are up to date with their childhood vaccinations before they can attend class, Kleinman points out. “Requiring school vaccination is standard,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do, and it’s how it’s done most places.”
Kleinman says he expects this policy to eventually be adopted in other school districts as well.
Dr. Richard Watkins, an infectious disease physician and a professor of internal medicine at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, tells Yahoo Life that this upcoming requirement is a “great idea,” adding that it’s “beneficial for the kids, families and the community.”
The COVID-19 positivity rate in Austin, Texas, schools is outpacing the rest of the community
The Austin Independent School District recently asked students to do remote learning to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Superintendent Stephanie S. Elizalde made the request in a letter to district families on Monday.
“As COVID-19 hospitalizations increase and tighter restrictions throughout the region have become necessary, Austin ISD is joining the call to action by encouraging families to have their students participate in remote off-campus instruction for the remainder of this week,” she wrote. Remote learning began on Tuesday and is expected to continue throughout the week.
While Elizalde didn’t give specifics, an Austin Public Health spokesperson shared data with Yahoo Life that show that, after testing 2,560 kids ages three through 18 last week, results from 19.8 percent of elementary-aged students came back positive, 20.2 percent of high schoolers had positive results and 27.1 percent of middle schoolers tested positive. The current positivity rate for the Austin area is 16.6 percent, the spokesperson said.
There were 22,270 new confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state, according to Wednesday data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
The Austin Independent School District currently requires that students wear masks on campus and on buses. It also provides each classroom with hand sanitizer and conducts daily health screenings for students and staff.
But a positivity rate that high suggests that something in the schools isn’t working, Kleinman says. “Schools are places for superspreading if they’re not handled with extreme care, and they’re places for spreading, even with care,” he says.
Virtual learning is divisive among students and teachers
Students and teachers across the country have rallied both for and against virtual learning. In Wisconsin’s South Milwaukee School District, students and parents staged protests this week to try to end remote learning.
South Milwaukee School District superintendent Jeffrey Weiss tells Yahoo Life that about 20 high school students came to the school on Monday to protest and a number of other students chose to not log in to remote learning that day. Later in the afternoon, roughly 75 people, including parents of students, participated in a demonstration.
On Monday evening, Weiss said the school board approved a plan to bring students back to school buildings beginning on Jan. 18 for elementary students and Jan. 25 for secondary students. The plan mostly uses a hybrid schedule, having groups of students attend in-person schooling on different days.
“It is tough to say what impact the protests had,” Weiss explains. “The board had been discussing a return to in-person learning since our Dec. 16 meeting. They definitely knew about it. The protest wasn’t referenced in any of the discussions that evening.”
Still, he says, “the School District of South Milwaukee is proud of our high school students for finding a peaceful way to express themselves related to their desire to return to in-person learning.”
But not everyone is tired of virtual schooling.
In South Carolina, the teacher’s group SC for ED is urging state schools to remain fully virtual among a recent rise in COVID-19 cases in the state. Data from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control show a large increase in COVID-19 cases, beginning in November. As of Wednesday, 27.1 percent of COVID-19 tests in South Carolina were positive, according to The State.
“Despite these numbers, and the increasing alarm of some hospitals in the state as they run out of capacity, many school districts chose to place their teachers and students in harms’ way, clearly choosing misinformation over safety,” the letter reads. “It is reprehensible to sacrifice the health of teachers by fostering an incorrect narrative of ‘learning loss’ in the midst of a global pandemic.”
Please consider taking action in order to keep our communities safe. pic.twitter.com/5BtfhsI21L
— SCforED (@SCforEd) January 10, 2021
The group also asked districts to “follow the scientific data of spread and remain virtual until the numbers decrease.”
South Carolina saw 4,809 new COVID-19 cases on Jan. 14, SCDHEC said.
Oklahoma waives quarantine requirements for students and school staff exposed to COVID-19
Schools in Oklahoma with a mask requirement that have COVID-19 safety protocols in place will no longer need to quarantine students and staff who are exposed to the coronavirus, state officials announced in a news conference on Tuesday.
Under the new guidelines, students and staff will only need to quarantine for two weeks if they show symptoms of COVID-19, provided they were exposed in a classroom where people were masked and socially distanced.
Oklahoma reported 3,142 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, according to state data.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister spoke out against the move in a statement to The Oklahoman. “While this option underscores the need for mask requirements in school, I cannot in good conscience support ignoring quarantine guidelines from the CDC and other infectious disease experts,” she said. “There is no doubt we all want our students and teachers to be safely in the classroom, but COVID is raging in Oklahoma. In-person instruction is critical, and so is mitigating the spread of the virus. They are not mutually exclusive.”
Hofmeister did not respond to Yahoo Life’s request for comment.
Infectious disease experts say this is a dangerous policy for schools. “I would not send my child to a school there,” Kleinman says. “COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease. When several people are exposed to someone who has it, the likelihood of a second, third or fourth case goes up.”
“It seems too premature, especially since we are in a post-holiday surge,” Watkins says. And, Kleinman adds, “this is just asking for problems.”
For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC’s and WHO’s resource guides.
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