Updated by Director of Student Health, Approved by CIRT

March 14, 2022 By Maureen Zambito

WEST LIBERTY, W.Va., March 14, 2022 – Please find below updated contact tracing guidelines as approved by the West Liberty University Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) and following CDC and Wheeling-Ohio County Health Department best practices.

Definition of terms

• Quarantine – separation from exposed people
• Isolation – separation from infected ipeople, even without symptoms
• Close contact in higher education – within 6 feet of someone for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more in a 24 hour period, regardless of masking practices.

Students/faculty/staff should report if they are diagnosed with COVID-19 or if they were named close contact of a positive case of COVID-19 using the positive report form linked here.

If you test positive for COVID-19 (isolate)

Everyone, regardless of their vaccination status:

• Stay home for 5 days. If you are a student residing on campus and cannot return home to self-isolate, WLU will attempt to provide you with self-isolation space based on availability.
• Complete the positive report form, indicating that you have tested positive.
• Inform your close contacts of the possible exposure (contacts see info below)
• Inform your professors that you cannot attend classes in person.
• If you tested off-campus, upload a copy of your positive test result showing your name and test date to the Student Health Portal. Home tests will not be accepted at this time.
• If you have symptoms and your symptoms are gone or greatly resolved after 5 days, you can leave isolation. If you have a fever, you should continue to self-isolate until your fever goes away. Raised
• Health Services will endeavor to contact you before your isolation ends and send you a written release of isolation.
• You will be advised to continue wearing a mask around others for another 5 days.
• Athletes must be seen by Athletic Training before resuming sport participation.

If you have been exposed to someone with Covid-19 (quarantine)
I. If you:

• have been boosted Where
• Completed primary series of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine in the last 5 months Where
• Completed primary series of J&J vaccine in the last 2 months

Then you should:

• Wear a mask around others for 10 days
• Test on Day 5. If you are a student, you can contact Student Health Services to schedule a free COVID test at 304-336-8049, Monday through Friday from 7 p.m. to 3 p.m. or you can test at an off-campus location and upload results to the Student Health Portal. Employees should request a test at one of the local testing sites, such as Doctors Urgent Care or Roxby Labs.

1. If you:

• Completed Pfizer or Moderna primary vaccine series more than 5 months ago and is not boosted Where
• Completed the first streak of J&J over 2 months ago and is not boosted Where
• Are not vaccinated

Then you should:

Stay home for 5 days. After that, continue wearing a mask around others for another 5 days.

• Fill in the positive report form, specifying that you are a direct contact
• Inform your teachers that you cannot attend classes in person
• Test on Day 5. You can contact Student Health Services to schedule a free COVID test at 304-336-8049, Monday through Friday 7-3 p.m. or you can test at an off-campus location and upload the results to the student health portal. . Employees should request a test at one of the local testing sites, such as Doctors Urgent Care or Roxby Labs.

If you develop symptoms, get tested and stay home

NOTE: Family Contacts are people who share a living space with someone diagnosed with COVID-19. This includes bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms, kitchens, etc. This also includes roommates in on-campus residence halls, apartments and houses, and roommates in on-campus halls of residence. Family contacts Homework quarantine if exposed to the case.

• If the contact can not separated from the case inside the home, the contact should be quarantined for the case’s (minimum) 5-day isolation period plus an additional 5 days. The contact will then have to wear a mask for an additional 5 days.

The separation requirements are as follows:

• The case should never be in the same room as household members.
• The case cannot share plates, cups, dishes or phones with household members.
• The case should have its own bathroom. Not possible? Housekeeping should do daily cleaning.

If household contacts develop symptoms of COVID-19, they should get tested.

*The protocol is subject to change

Sources:

New rules have been introduced for close contacts linked to COVID-19 cases in Western Australian schools.

The changes come after the state recorded another day of more than 2,000 infections on Sunday.

Based on updated public health advice, the new rules mean that parents and caregivers are no longer required to self-quarantine when providing care to a child identified as a close contact with a COVID case. -19.

Depending on the needs of the child, a parent or caregiver may still need to stay home to care for them during their quarantine.

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) – At the start of COVID, public health officials attempted to contact everyone who tested positive. Now, some agencies have concluded that they just can’t catch everyone, so they’re changing their strategy.

Health officials depended on contact tracing to help reduce the spread of COVID. The idea was that if you tested positive, you would receive a call from a health worker asking who you have been around so they can determine if those contacts could also be spreading COVID.

But Omicron sent such a high number of cases that health experts concluded they couldn’t reach everyone, so they better shift priorities.

The Arizona Department of Health Services said it is reducing contact tracing for the general population and focusing on congregate living — places like nursing homes and homeless shelters where populations are most vulnerable and where nearby neighborhoods facilitate the spread of the virus.

Pima County Health Director Dr. Terry Cullen says Pima County is still working to contact anyone who tests positive, but is giving some settings an extra priority.

“The predominant impetus for contact tracing right now is our school cases and our community life cases. Both of these continue to be very high risk situations. And we continue to do contact tracing in them.

Dr. Cullen says the county was hitting a thousand new cases a day last month. Unless someone refuses to cooperate – and some refuse – a tracer may learn that two or three other people need to call. The phone call itself can last an average of 20 minutes.

Dr Cullen says: “That means we would have had a thousand cases to investigate and two to three thousand contacts. This was not the case at the time. So to be blunt as we say we are still doing contact tracing. In the midst of these very high numbers, people were not being contacted.

She says the number of more recent cases has declined, but is still well above levels considered dangerously high.

Dr Cullen says more than data is lost when people don’t hear about contact tracers. Tracers can offer advice on how best to quarantine and where to find services that can help get through their COVID cases.

HOWELL, NJ — School districts in New Jersey have begun announcing changes to their existing COVID-19 protocols as the state’s mask mandate ends March 7. Among them are Howell Township Public Schools, which recently announced a halt to COVID-19 contact tracing efforts.

On Wednesday, Feb. 9, Howell Township Public Schools Superintendent Joseph Isola announced that beginning Thursday, the school district would no longer be looking for contracts. This means that close contacts at school will no longer be identified and will have to be quarantined.

“However, symptomatic individuals, close household contacts, and those who test positive for COVID-19 will still need to follow appropriate exclusion protocols,” Isola said in a letter to parents in the district.

Howell will also transition to a mask-optional environment in accordance with Governor Murphy’s recent announcement. In the same letter, Isola wrote that the remote learning program would only become available again for students in grades 3-8.

“We are committed to providing a safe learning environment for all individuals and we will monitor available data relating to COVID-19. We will maintain good hygiene and safety protocols, such as physical distancing wherever possible,” Isola continued.

Any additional changes to the district’s COVID-19 protocols will be updated as needed throughout the remainder of the school year.

The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District is no longer conducting COVID-19 contact tracing at schools where universal masking is in place, in accordance with updates to the district’s mitigation plan announced last month . Additionally, staff and students who test positive and show symptoms of COVID-19 are now allowed to return to school or work as early as five days after testing positive, provided the symptoms have resolved. for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication. .

KPBSD communications director Pegge Erkeneff said on Thursday that the decision to halt contact tracing in schools where universal masking is observed was partly due to a spike in cases that nurses and district staff ” couldn’t keep up” in mid-January. A review of the number of close contact students who later tested positive, as well as the time it took for school staff to contact the trace were also factored into the decision, Erkeneff said.

When a school moves to universal masking, Erkeneff said, the time of nurses and staff is “no longer spent” on contact tracing. More generally, Erkeneff said the trend of halting contact tracing is something the KPBSD leadership is watching.

“In mid-January, with the increase in positive cases of COVID-19, our staff were unable to follow up on contact tracing,” Erkeneff said via email.

Erkeneff confirmed that stopping contact tracing in schools where universal masking is in place will skew close contact data reflected on the district’s COVID-19 dashboard by reducing those numbers. She said the dashboard will still reflect data from people who self-report and at schools where contact tracing is still happening.

As of Thursday, at least 13 of KPBSD’s 42 schools — representing about 2,800 students and staff in the district — were operating with universal masking. To determine whether a school enters or exits Universal Indoor Masking, KPBSD uses the criteria outlined in the district’s COVID-19 mitigation plan.

A “conversation” between district administrators and school site administrators is triggered when a school district meets four of the five criteria set out in the plan. Factors considered include a school community positivity rate of 3% or greater, a student absenteeism rate of 25% or greater, the capacity of local and regional hospitals and intensive care units, the number of cases of COVID-19 of one community per 100,000 people and the impact of school staff absenteeism. rate.

Additionally, under changes announced last month, KPBSD staff and students who test positive and show symptoms of COVID-19 are now allowed to return to school or work as early as five days after tested positive. That’s as long as the symptoms go away for at least 24 hours without the help of medication.

Under the district’s previous iteration of the policy, which was announced Jan. 11, COVID-positive students and staff could return to school or work five days after testing positive, but only if they were asymptomatic.

Schools will still follow the district’s symptom-free protocol and apply multi-level COVID-19 mitigation strategies. Students and staff are also encouraged to take advantage of testing resources made available by the district, such as free at-home testing kits, in-school testing, and testing from community partners.

According to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard, which went live last August, more than 1,650 positive COVID-19 test results have been reported to the district by students and more than 350 positive results have been reported by staff. KPBSD’s COVID-19 Dashboard can be viewed at covid19.kpbsd.org/dashboard.

Contact reporter Ashlyn O’Hara at ashlyn.ohara@peninsulaclarion.com.

At the start of the pandemic, the COVIDSafe app was designed as a tool to improve contact tracing. And a multimedia campaign promoted it as helping to find more COVID contacts faster.

Today, almost two years after its launch in April 2020, we publish in Lancet Public Health our assessment of the effectiveness and usefulness of the app in New South Wales.

We analyzed data from 619 recorded COVID cases in NSW aged over 12 and their contacts between May and November 2020. We also surveyed contact tracers to find out if they found the app useful.

Our analysis showed that the app did not add much value to the existing conventional contact tracing system.

A total of 22% of cases used the app. Most (61%) of the contacts registered by the app as “close contacts” turned out not to be epidemiologically linked to a case. The app only detected 15% of true close contacts identified by conventional contact tracing.

In total, COVIDSafe detected only 17 additional true close contacts in New South Wales during the six-month evaluation period.

This has resulted in substantial additional work for contact tracers and overall has not made a significant contribution to the COVID response in NSW.

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Read more: From COVID control to chaos – what now for Australia? Two paths are open to us

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Tracing takes time

Interviewing new cases to identify, trace and isolate their close contacts is a critical public health activity. But that takes time, and contact tracers can be quickly overwhelmed when the number of cases increases.

Digital contact tracing apps were enthusiastically adopted at the start of the COVID pandemic in many countriesincluding Australia.

Like many other tracing apps, COVIDSafe uses smartphones’ built-in Bluetooth feature to exchange signals between phones.

The duration, frequency and transmission strength of these “digital handshakes” are used to determine whether two smartphone users have come into “close contact” with each other.

Poor ability to correctly detect and identify close contacts

During our study period, less than a quarter of all cases used the app. That’s half the proportion of the general Australian public who have done so.

Of the cases that used the app, many did not have a single contact recorded by the app. For others, contact tracers were unable to access app data.

Contact tracers could use app data for 32 (5%) of 619 cases during our study period. Of these cases, only 79 (39%) of the 205 contacts recorded by the app as “close contacts” could be verified as true close contacts. This suggests a low positive predictive value of the app.

Here are examples of fake close contacts recorded by the app:

• neighbors in different apartments in apartment buildings

• office workers in adjoining rooms

• customers from nearby restaurants

• people waiting in separate cars at drive-through COVID testing clinics.

The vast majority (85%) of close contacts identified by conventional contact tracing were not detected by the app, indicating low sensitivity.

Some additional contacts detected

In the six months of our study, there were only 17 true close contacts identified by COVIDSafe who would otherwise have been missed – a tiny fraction of the more than 25,300 close contacts detected and tracked through conventional contact tracing in New South Wales during the same period.

None of those 17 contacts have tested positive. COVIDSafe therefore did not contribute to preventing new exposures in New South Wales during our evaluation period.

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Read more: Free rapid antigen tests make economic sense for governments, our analysis shows

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Technological defects

Contact tracers didn’t find the app easy to use. Some said the app doesn’t seem to work as reliably on all types of phones. The number of contacts on iPhones was grossly underestimated, while those on Android phones were overestimated.

Contact tracers have also noted the app’s apparent inability to properly save contacts unless it’s open. This could explain the large number of cases without any contact recorded in our study.

The process of matching close contacts identified by the app with those identified during case interviews was considered time-consuming, especially since most of the contacts detected by the app were not actually close contacts.

Staff interviewed said it could easily overwhelm the contact tracing system if the number of cases had been higher, paradoxically reducing the usefulness of the app when it was needed most.

Overall, contact tracers’ perceptions of the app ranged from “not having much impact” to being an extra step that increased the workload without adding much value.

Little added value at high costs

In our study, COVIDSafe did not make a significant contribution to the COVID response in New South Wales in 2020. Instead, the app created a high workload without any clear benefit.

This contrasts with the 7.7 million Australian dollars he cost to develop and run COVIDSafe until the end of April 2021, with estimated maintenance between $60,000 and $75,000 per month since.

The arrival of the highly transmissible variant of Omicron at the end of 2021 in Australia, coinciding with the lifting of most public health restrictions, has led to a massive increase in the number of cases, forcing a series of major adjustments in the search for contacts.

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Read more: Australia has all but ditched the COVIDSafe app in favor of QR codes (so be sure to check in)

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In most parts of Australia, contact tracing now plays a very limited role in controlling COVID. Nevertheless, it is likely to stay a key public health intervention for infectious diseases in the future.

For digital contact tracing apps to be effective and useful, it will be important to involve contact tracers when designing the system, testing the underlying technology under real-world conditions, and evaluating the app regularly. after deployment.

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Dr Anthea Katelaris, a public health physician who worked at the Western Sydney Local Health District Public Health Unit at the time of the study, co-authored the research referenced in this article.

The Coatesville Area School District will no longer conduct contact tracing in accordance with its updated health and safety plan, approved by the board at the Jan. 25 meeting.

Superintendent Tomás Hanna said the decision to end contact tracing was based on recent guidance from the Chester County Health Department.

Administration recommends that all students, staff, and visitors continue to follow masking guidelines in all district buildings and on school transportation. Students and staff who test positive for COVID-19 are asked to self-isolate for a period of five days from the date of onset of their symptoms before returning to school. According to Hanna, the district administration will continue to review local transmission rates and make updated recommendations to the council as needed.

The district continues to manage its $9.3 million budget gap for the 2022-23 school year. The $9.3 million total does not include salary or benefit increases, charter school costs, regular or special education costs, or contract escalations for the coming year. .

Hanna presented options to the council on how the district could work to close its budget gap.

Options include exploring how the district can use emergency relief funds for elementary and secondary schools to offset expenses directly related to COVID-19 relief and evaluating how this can reduce programming and personnel costs. Hanna stressed that if the district were to make any program or staff reductions, it would aim to make choices that will have the least direct impact on Coatesville students.

“If we find areas in staffing that we can reduce to help balance the budget, first we need to weigh those options with the impact on student achievement,” Hanna said.

The next board meeting will be at 6 p.m. on February 8.

UNION COUNTY, North Carolina — In an 8-1 vote Tuesday night, the Union County Public Schools Board of Education approved an end to contact tracing and quarantine requirements.

Citing a joint resolution approved with Union County commissioners, approved last month, the council said there was now a marked drop in COVID-19 cases.

Falling cases were one of the criteria for ending contact tracing and quarantines.

What do you want to know

Starting Feb. 7, UCPS will end contact tracing and quarantine policies

The council, citing the never-ending nature of the pandemic and the desire to keep children in school, voted 8-1

Council members say the decision has the support of the county health director

In a document from Union County Health Director Dennis Joyner, posted on the council’s online records platform, he noted the drop in COVID-19 cases.

“Over the past week, Union County has experienced a decline in the number of COVID-19 cases,” the statement said.

You can read the full document here.

The vote comes after board members and commissioners met on January 25 to vote on a new joint resolution, saying they would end the policies when cases drop.

“Independent of NCDHHS action, we anticipate changes to our approach to school quarantine and contact tracing procedures when we determine that cases in Union County are declining in the current surge. We expect this to happen in the coming weeks. Our aim will be to develop a collaborative approach that allows children to stay in school if they are not positive or symptomatic – the new approach is being developed and will be provided to the public in the coming week(s)” , said the resolution read.

You can read the full joint resolution here.

The new policy will come into effect on Monday, February 7. School staff will notify parents of changes to the policy, its impact on students, and the options parents have to prevent students from attending school if they are exposed to COVID-19.

“I move that Union County Public Schools end contact tracing and quarantine requirements beginning this Monday, February 7,” said Vice President Kathy Heintel, who introduced the motion.

Board member Gary Sides said despite the vote, they wanted to make it clear that students and staff who test positive should still stay away from schools.

“We are not changing our policy of students or staff who test positive with the virus, with COVID, allowed in the building, on the property. They are yet to be isolated. There has been no change. Let me be very clear, like if you have the flu, stay home. If you test positive and you are sick, you stay home,” Sides said after the motion was filed.

Board member John Kirkpatrick was the only one to vote against, saying it was too early to end mitigation efforts.

“We have a 41% HIV rate, in the county, and we don’t have a mask mandate, which helps keep kids in school. Agreed. And we are preparing to eliminate contact tracing in our schools, the only measures we have to deal with this pandemic,” Kirkpatrick said.

“I think it can be a very dangerous decision right now to remove the only measures we have to keep children safe, not only children but also to keep families safe,” Kirkpatrick continued. “I don’t think that’s a wise decision.”

Heintel hit back at her claim, saying county schools were isolating positive cases among students and staff. She also said several other states have taken similar steps to end certain COVID-19 policies.

“It’s not new in the United States to do this,” Heintel said.

Several board members have repeatedly said the never-ending nature of the pandemic is part of the reason they want to end contact tracing and quarantines. They have said in public meetings over the past few months that the policies are keeping what they call healthy children and staff out of schools and away from education.

These concerns were reflected in the language of the joint resolution, approved last month.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that this virus is not going away and that we are going to have to learn to live with it in a way that does not unreasonably risk our children’s education and mental health,” the agency said. common resolution in part.

This is not the first time the council has made changes to contact tracing and quarantine procedures. Earlier this school year, the board voted to have school staff no longer take the lead in contact tracing and quarantines, saying it was the duty of the county health department. After a standoff with the state, the issue was resolved and a working agreement was reached with the health department to run the practice.

On Tuesday night, board members said the policy change had Joyner’s approval. Spectrum News 1 has asked Union County to provide an update on Joyner’s position on ending contact tracing and quarantine policies.

The statement detailing the declining cases, provided online by the county health department, did not contain any endorsement or criticism of the council’s decision or the planned motion.

Minutes later, the board again voted 8 to 1 to keep masks optional in Union County schools until next month. Kirkpatrick was the only vote against.