As schools reopen around in Mississippi and at other places in the United States, their ability to quickly identify and contain coronavirus outbreaks before they get out of hand is about to be put to the test.
As the spread of coronavirus comes to control at isolated places in the world and countries trying to get back to business, at some places, schools have also started to reopen but the task also comes with a lot of challenges. Reopening schools is easy but keeping them open will be the hard part. As educators prepare to welcome students back to class for the first time in months, schools' ability to quickly identify and contain coronavirus outbreaks before they get out of hand will be put to the test in thousands of districts around the country.
Schools start to reopen in US with challenges ahead
Newly reopened schools in Mississippi, Indiana and Georgia have already reported infections just days into the academic year, triggering virus protocols that include swiftly isolating infected students, tracing their contacts and quarantining people they exposed.
"It doesn’t matter if you open schools in July, like we did, or if you open in August, September or October. All schools are going to have to deal with the issue of positive COVID-19 test results,” said Lee Childress, superintendent of Corinth School District in Mississippi, where more than 100 students are quarantined at home after being exposed to a handful of infected classmates.
How schools are/can minimise risk
- Schools are trying to mitigate the risk of transmission by spreading desks apart, serving meals in the classroom, and keeping groups of students together throughout the day.
- Many schools — but not all — will require students and staff to wear masks, which health experts say is critical to cutting down on spread.
- Contact tracing might prove difficult “when you have that many students and they have multiple contacts inside of a building,” said Dallas schools chief Michael Hinojosa.
- New York City’s public school system, the largest in the US, says it will automatically shutter classrooms or buildings for 14 days at a time, depending on the severity and circumstances of an outbreak.
- In hard-hit Texas, school systems in Houston and Dallas say they will close a building for up to five days if a student or staffer tests positive, to allow for cleaning and to give contact tracers time to do their work.
- Until there's a vaccine, just be prepared to have these rolling shutdowns, an official said.
- Others administrators say they will try to keep schools open during an outbreak, counting on quick action to keep a lid on it.
- In Pennsylvania, the Bethlehem Area School District intends to keep classrooms open if there’s a confirmed case.
Schools are reopening as new infections run at about 55,000 a day in the US. While that's down from a peak of well over 70,000 in the second half of July, cases are rising in about half of the states, and deaths are climbing in many of them.
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