North Carolina’s K-12 school reopening is not driving COVID-19 spike, officials say
State health officials on Thursday downplayed the impact that K-12 school reopening is having on the rising number of new coronavirus cases in North Carolina.
Those denials came the same day that the Wake County school system updated its coronavirus dashboard to report 20 new confirmed cases over the past week. Wake County is North Carolina’s largest school district, with 160,000 students and 191 schools.
On Thursday, the state reported its second-highest number of new daily coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, part of a spike over the past two weeks.
But Dr. Betsey Cuervo Tilson, the state health director and N.C. Department of Health and Human Services chief medical officer, said Thursday that children ages 0-17 “are not driving our increases.”
“Although yes there are cases and there are clusters in school settings, and we all expected that, we are still not seeing our school settings as a big driver of the cases,” Tilson said at Thursday’s State Board of Education meeting.
“When we think about what’s causing the surge of our cases in North Carolina, and we continue to look everyday, it does not seem that it is the schools themselves that are the big driver of that.”
Students returning for in-person classes
The majority of North Carolina’s 1.5 million public school students started the new school year in August taking only online classes due to health concerns over COVID-19.
But an increasing number of students are returning for in-person classes, especially after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper allowed elementary schools to reopen for full-time, daily in-person classes.
Cooper is still requiring middle schools and high schools to operate under social-distancing requirements that have resulted in many older students getting no or only limited in-person classes.
Republican elected officials, including GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, have criticized Cooper for not allowing all K-12 public schools to fully reopen for in-person instruction. Cooper defeated Forest this week to win a second term as governor.
But some groups, such as the North Carolina Association of Educators, have complained that it’s not yet safe to reopen schools for in-person instruction.
Children at less risk of COVID-19
Tilson told state board members Thursday that children are less at risk of COVID-19 than adults and that students benefit from in-person instruction.
“We do know that children can get and they can spread COVID-19,” Tilson said. “We do know that. But one of the things that we are consistently finding is that children in general have mild illness or no symptoms.”
But Tilson also defended the limits on middle schools and high schools, saying older children are more likely to spread COVID-19 than elementary students.
Health officials hope that the majority of students and school employees will have access to a coronavirus vaccine by the spring, Tilson said. But she said they hope a vaccine, which is still under development, will be available for high-risk individuals before then.
As of Tuesday, the state has reported 297 COVID-19 cases associated with 34 active clusters at K-12 public and private schools. A cluster is when five or more confirmed cases are linked together.
The K-12 clusters account for 0.1% of the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases, Tilson said. She said no deaths have been linked to K-12 clusters.
Wake schools report 20 new COVID-19 cases
The Wake County school system doesn’t have any clusters reported. But on Thursday it reported 25 confirmed COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks. That includes 20 cases this week, up from five the first week.
Wake’s list includes cases reported as of Wednesday so it doesn’t include a new case reported Thursday at Broughton High School in Raleigh, it’s second in the last two days. The list also doesn’t includes Bugg Elementary, where parents were notified by the school of a case this week.
The return of students to in-person classes on Oct. 26 prompted the school district to debut last week an online COVID-19 dashboard (www.wcpss.net/Page/46136). It’s updated each Thursday.
Thousands of Wake elementary students and some special-education students returned for in-person classes last week for the first time since March 13. By Nov. 16, all PreK-3 students will have daily in-person classes and students in fourth and fifth grades will be on a rotation of one week of in-person classes and two weeks of online classes.
Middle school students will begin returning Monday on that rotation of in-person and online classes.
High school students won’t return for in-person classes until at least January, but some athletes are on campus for workouts.
Individual Wake schools are notifying families whenever they’re told that an individual associated with the school has tested positive for COVID-19. Due to privacy laws, the schools don’t say whether the people who tested positive are students or school employees.
Schools are using the same form message telling people that they’re working with the Wake County Public Health Division to identify and notify anyone who may have been in close contact with the person who tested positive.
The message also tells families that the person who tested positive won’t return until certain requirements are met and areas at school that may have been exposed to the virus will be thoroughly cleaned.
Schools with reported cases
Cases have been reported at these Wake schools:
▪ Alston Ridge Elementary (1 case)
▪ Broughton High (2 cases)
▪ Bugg Elementary (1 case that was reported to parents but not confirmed by health officials)
▪ Carnage Middle (2 cases from same household)
▪ Cedar Fork Elementary (2 cases from same household)
▪ Durant Road Middle (1 case)
▪ Forest Pines Elementary (1 case)
▪ Fuquay-Varina High (2 cases from same household)
▪ Heritage High (1 case)
▪ Hilburn Academy (1 case)
▪ Kingswood Elementary (1 case)
▪ Knightdale Elementary (1 case)
▪ Lincoln Heights Elementary (1 case)
▪ Oakview Elementary (1 case)
▪ Panther Creek High (1 case)
▪ River Oaks Middle (1 case)
▪ Salem Elementary (1 case)
▪ Southeast Raleigh High (1 case)
▪ Wakefield Middle (1 case)
▪ West Millbrook Middle (2 cases)
▪ Wilburn Elementary (1 case)
In addition to the cases at individual schools, Wake is reporting a confirmed case involving a school district employee that’s not connected to a specific school or district office.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 3:17 PM with the headline "North Carolina’s K-12 school reopening is not driving COVID-19 spike, officials say."
