12/17/2020 BOARD OF HEALTH Minutes

Home Browse Search

PROS • The goal is to keep kids healthy and in school. The rising COVID-19 cases in the community and the documented occurrences with positives from other high-risk sports teams are affecting the goal. • The healthcare system and the contact tracing professionals are overwhelmed now. School cases that may involve an entire team could easily make the situation worse where it affects the follow- up for other cases. The contact tracing process is slow anyways because of the time it takes for the labs or the initial reporters of the positive to enter the case into the database and then have the contact tracers actually reach the positive to determine the close contacts. Then contact tracers must contact the close contacts to make sure they interviewed, get tested and educated to quarantine correctly. • The timing of the winter sports season has come after holidays where gatherings have occurred and spread COVID-19 at an increased rate. Christmas and New Years are coming and the positivity rate is expected to increase. • The positivity rate of COVID-19 has risen to 3.53% in the last 14 days. The positivity rate is determined by the number of positive results divided by the number of tests. 1500 tests were administered in the last 14 days with 53 positive results. In comparison, the positivity rate on November 16,2020 was 1.31%with 882 tests over the previous 14 days. • The incidence rate one month ago was 4.6. The incidence rate is expressed per 100,000 people as a population averaged over 7 days. The incidence rate on December 16,2020 was 23.91. This shows that there is community spread occurring. • The VNA is concerned about the gatherings that occur before and after the games. CONS • There is no in-school spread right now. The kids, parents,teachers and coaches have been doing a great job with their safety protocols. • Canceling the municipal school winter sports program will force the students to local private sports programs where the coaches may have not received training on all the safety protocols. We used this same example for Halloween. We knew that if we canceled the door-to-door tradition we would force the families into indoor private parties. • Nurse Schakel has taken the time to perform training for the coaches to educate them on the safety measures within the DPH guidance. Included in that training is the preparation of rosters and personal contact information for close contact tracing. Private sports organizations are not that prepared. • No spectators are allowed at the games. All games will be streamed so parents can watch online. • The players arrive by bus all ready to play. The locker rooms are not utilized. • Any common areas used by different teams are disinfected in between uses by DPW. • Dr. Greg Parkinson, the School's consulting physician stated that the infectious rate students learning virtually is higher than in-school student learning. • There were lessons learned from the Fall Sports season. • One positive on the team and the entire team is quarantined so the players know that they need to be careful if they want to continue to play. Mr. Harrington stated that the question remained what metric to use to make a decision if/when to cancel the winter sports program. The Board of Health and school administrators wrestled with this decision when school was resuming in the fall,and were trying to determine how/when to make the decision to close a school. Mr. Harrington was of the opinion that a significant in- school spread or Increase In infectious rate, or a reduction in staff or student body population where it was no longer worth keeping a school open,would give them their answer. Thankfully, neither of those situations has occurred. Mr. Harrington stated that the communication with the 5