Some NB parents frustrated with change to school contact tracing policy – New Brunswick

Some parents in New Brunswick are frustrated and confused by the contact tracing process in schools across the province.

Erin Ellis, a school-age mother of two in Moncton, said she didn’t get a call from Public Health until a week after her child tested positive for COVID-19.

She said they only asked about her child’s contacts for two days before she tested positive, and she received confusing advice on how to follow up.

On Thursday evening, Oromocto mother-of-three Haley Jones received an email from the principal of her children’s school explaining that in the future, all students in K-8 schools “would be required to attend daily rapid tests when there is confirmed Covid-19. case at school. Close contacts will not be exclusively informed as they were in the past.

This means that if anyone in the school system, including a parent, reports a positive result to public health, all students will be tested quickly.

There will no longer be any additional context provided, such as what level or class the person is in, or if the person is even a student.

That’s too vague for Jones, and she says the parents resorted to trading positive test results, compromising their child’s privacy.

This has created a whispering network where parents try to keep themselves informed through unofficial channels.

“I think it’s particularly concerning because we haven’t received these contact tracing notifications for privacy reasons,” she said in a Zoom interview on Friday.

“Nobody wants their child to be the one to start an outbreak at school. I would be afraid that my children would be bullied.

She also expressed her fear of depending on being in the right social circles to be informed.

“It seems like if you don’t know about your school community, you just don’t get to know it.”

In a statement released to Global News by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development on Friday afternoon, the province clarified that “contact tracing efforts are no longer focused on individual classes, as is the case. was previously the case with the K-8 levels. This change will help manage the risk of transmission in the school community, especially for age groups that do not have high levels of vaccination.

Contact tracing will continue in high schools, however.

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