Chris Hodges, the principal of Gaylord High School in Otsego County, Michigan, never thought he would be a contact tracer.
“I really thought, you know, ‘Why – why am I doing this?'” he laughed. “That’s not why I went to school.”
In what has become a regular part of his school day, Hodges Fields reports on his accusations such as hearing from the Northwest Michigan Health Department that a female student had tested positive for the new coronavirus and was at school for three days when she could have been contagious.
One Tuesday in April, after the school day was over, he found himself walking through the nearly empty hallways with a laptop and tape measure, making a list of other students who were sitting close enough. of their sick classmate so that they need to self-quarantine.
Lisa Peacock, the department’s health officer, said without help from the school district, it would be “literally impossible” to keep up with contact tracing.
The school-age population has accounted for a growing share of recent coronavirus cases in northern Michigan, and Peacock said quickly identifying people at risk of these cases and telling them how to quarantine themselves is crucial to protecting communities. and contain the spread.
When Hodges began helping the health department with contact tracing, he found himself calling teachers on weekends, holidays, and late in the day after they got home, asking them where a one student in particular was sitting and struggling to orient himself in the classroom as they described the student’s position on the phone.
It’s happened so often that he now asks every teacher to keep an up-to-date room plan in a bright yellow folder on top of his desk so he can find it easily.
But in this case, the teacher, Hannah Romel, was still at school. The student Hodges was looking for is in her yearbook class, which has different seating arrangements every day. Romel handed the three cards to Hodges and he got to work.
Wherever Romel had marked the student, Hodges extended his measuring tape to the surrounding desks.
Teachers have spaced out their seats as much as they can, he said, but sometimes they can’t quite reach the required 6ft distance to avoid counting as close contact.
(The federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines last month to allow for 3-foot distancing between offices, but only in communities with low transmission. In that district, Superintendent Brian Pearson said, during Michigan’s recent surge in cases, 6-foot separation is the norm.)
Hodges acted quickly, both because if he did not complete contact tracing the same day, the school cannot open the next day, and because he wanted to connect with the students’ families. exposed to the virus right away.
“We want to make these phone calls as soon as possible, so that these students are not at work, not at church, not going to other people’s houses. We want to prevent the spread of covid not just within our walls, but in our community,” he said.
Hodges will then forward information about who was in close contact with the student to the local health department. Other nearby school districts are conducting similar operations.
Nationally, this type of relationship between schools and health services is not typical in normal times, but it happens with some regularity during the pandemic, said Adriane Casalotti, head of government and business. from the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
Funding for public health has declined over the past few decades, she said, forcing local departments to cut staff who could have bolstered their contact tracing capacity.
Still, getting schools and health services to work together can greatly help communities, Casalotti said.
Peacock, the local health worker, said once his staff hear about the exposures at local schools, they will also be reaching out to families to tell them the details.
“People always have questions,” she said. “They have questions about ‘What does this mean? What does it mean that I am quarantined for 14 days? We recognize that.
And, in some cases, the health department needs more information than Hodges can provide, Peacock said. They may want to find out if a variant of the coronavirus is involved or do a more detailed investigation of how students got sick and where they were when they were contagious.
Back in Romel’s yearbook classroom, Hodges found two students sitting just under 6 feet from their classmate who tested positive. They will need to be quarantined for two weeks from the date of their last exposure.
Romel said she was always surprised to learn that a student was sick.
“I worry about the child,” she said. “Hopefully it’s a mild case, and they can just be okay and go back to school after their quarantine period and come back and learn with us again.”
After a brief chat with Romel about whether the class had done any group work on the days in question (it hadn’t, which Hodges says is a relief, as it complicates his process), he headed to the next class.
In all, 14 students will be quarantined following exposure to this coronavirus case.
That’s a lot, Hodges said, but it’s a far cry from the number of quarantines resulting from a single day last month when 15 students tested positive, and each of them had multiple close contacts.
Making phone calls to families to let them know their child will have to stay home from school for up to two weeks is not a pleasant part of the day, for him or the families, Hodges said, but it is happy to play a role in mitigating the spread of the pandemic.
This story comes from a reporting partnership that includes WCMU, NPR and KHN.
Comments are closed.