Utah students can go to school after exposure to COVID-19 – guidelines

Utah students will be allowed to go to school even if they’ve been directly exposed to COVID-19, according to new guidelines released Thursday by the state health department.
Under what officials are calling “a modified quarantine,” parents will be given the choice to keep children home or send them back to class after close contact with the contagious virus — which they can do as long as the student is not showing any symptoms and no one in the immediate household has tested positive. Teachers and staff, too, can continue to come to work with the same rules, especially in cases where there are no substitutes available.

“This will allow children to stay in the educational system and get the classroom setting that they need,” said Dr. Angela Dunn, the state’s epidemiologist, during a virtual news conference Thursday.

Dunn said the process is the same one that essential employees in Utah, such as medical professionals or grocery workers, have used during the outbreak. “And it has worked,” she added.

Schools should only shut down, the health department advises, after 15 individuals have tested positive in the same time frame (or 10% in schools with fewer than 100 people). And then, the closure should be for two weeks, the incubation period of the virus. For a single classroom to go online, there would need to be three people with COVID-19.

Otherwise, schools statewide are encouraged to operate in person under the governor’s orders for this fall.

“We’re not going to sit back in the corner and wring our hands and say, ‘We can’t do anything,’” Gov. Gary Herbert said Thursday.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2020/07/30/utah-students-can-still/