CLEVELAND — The Ohio Department of Health is ending universal contact tracing for schools that required them to investigate each positive case.
“As covid-19 evolves, so are public mitigation strategies changes to keep pace,” said Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff.
It’s a shift for schools and health departments – for a system Dr. Vanderhoff says became impractical and less impactful.
“The reality was that there was virtually no school that was able to universally contact trace students all across their district,” said Dr. Vanderhoff in a Thursday virtual news conference.
ODH sent a memo to superintendents in K-12 schools Wednesday outlining a new policy that requires investigation and contact tracing only for clusters or localized outbreaks.
This will free up health departments to focus on congregate settings, like nursing homes, while the state's safety guidance around getting kids vaccinated, keeping masks mandatory in schools and testing for extracurriculars, stays the same.
“We’re not asking parents to guess where the exposure might be coming from. What we’re advising parents is, the exposure is everywhere,” said Vanderhoff. He explained many other states have already made this change, following the guidance of national health groups.
“It was very difficult to tell where anybody was actually infected because, you know, you could have been at school, you could have been at the grocery store,” said Commissioner Donna Skoda with Summit County Public Health. “When you look at how widespread omicron was, it really does make sense now that we're at a point in the pandemic where those strategies may not be as effective.”
Skoda says her office is following up with the state to better understand the details. “We're going to look for answers…some assistance in defining that cluster. What does it look like? And the timeline around a cluster. And we're also looking for the very thing that parents are asking: what will notification of parents look like? And what will the reporting mechanisms be to parents to make sure they stay informed of what's happening?” she said.
The memo says districts can report cases to county health departments weekly, instead of daily starting Friday, Feb. 4. Contact tracing has been a time-consuming burden for administrators as omicron cases skyrocketed, not to mention the impacts on learning.
“You have to pick up where you left off every time you have to quarantine students, you have to bring back and catch and that's very hard to do,” said Eric Butler, an assistant principal with Parma Community Middle/High School.
Butler says now the focus can be on keeping students in the classroom, both for their social and emotional health, as well as educational goals.
“I think it's a good thing for schools…It shows that we're starting to loosen the grip on bit, and I think that's really, really important maintaining the success of students,” he said.
You can watch Dr. Vanderhoff's Thursday briefing below:
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