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By Dylana Kneeshaw

COVID-19 WITHIN SCHOOLS

S.D. 73, Interior Health working to limit uptick in school exposures

Feb 1, 2021 | 5:05 PM

KAMLOOPS — There are at least eight different schools within School District 73 identified as having COVID-19 exposures.

According to Interior Health, in the last two weeks Marion Schilling Elementary, Beattie Elementary, Summit Elementary and Aberdeen Elementary have had exposures. High school exposures include Sa-Hali Secondary, Valleyview Secondary, NorKam Secondary and Westsyde Secondary.

S.D. 73 Superintendent Terry Sullivan says staff are doing their best to stay on top of cleaning and other protection measures, but eventually community transmission seeps into the school population.

“The last three weekends actually our staff have been working with Interior Health with respect to helping them with their contact tracing, so it’s been fairly intense work.”

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Sa-Hali Secondary has had four different exposure notices sent out within the last two weeks. Sullivan says he knows parents feel uneasy after getting these notifications.

“The phenomenon that we see when we have these cases is that parents will withdraw their students for a number of days until they can be sure that the situation has stabilized and then the students will go back.”

So far, the majority of positive school cases have been the result of household or community transmission. Sullivan says he’s not aware of direct virus transmission within schools, but it’s not out of the question.

“I think we have done a good job in schools of reducing transmission,” Sullivan stresses, “The transmission among young children is practically negligible. And certainly among older kids, that’s where it’s more likely to occur — in secondary schools, and I think probably we are experiencing a little bit of that now as a result of what’s happened since Christmas.”

Sullivan says the District wouldn’t halt in-person classes at a school unless staffing levels became unmanageably low and Interior Health Medical Health Officer Dr. Carol Fenton says schools will stay open unless there was an uncontrolled outbreak.

“The most important thing we look for is whether or not there is uncontrolled transmission that would only be controlled if we stopped the in-person classes,” she explains. “So right now, we’re not at that stage. We’re just seeing exposures from outside the school and then the students happened to go to school while they were infectious.”

Dr. Fenton says contact tracers have been keeping up with new school exposures and if a student or staff members needs to isolate, they will be quickly notified.

“That’s still going according to plan and we’re just seeing more of them because there is more COVID in the community.”