School contact tracing focused on younger students

PALMER — As cases of COVID-19 rise around the state, Mat-Su Borough School District schools are being affected by longer closures due to the Department of Health and Social Services contact tracing abilities. With more cases, tracking down close contacts is taking longer which has resulted in longer school closures among MSBSD high schools.

“We feel like the mitigation that we’re doing in schools is really effective,” said MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani. “Another huge part of the decision making has to do with DHSS’s capacity to do the contact tracing. So a case that had happened two or three weeks ago might’ve resulted in only a classroom being excluded for a time period or maybe the school for one day, but as the cases across the community have increased their ability to contact trace each of our cases has diminished. So out of an abundance of caution you’ve noticed this week schools are being closed more frequently and for longer and that’s primarily because the bottleneck on contact tracing.”

An additional 333 students went from at-home learning to at-school learning since the board last met, and Trani presented stats for the first quarter that came to a close last Wednesday. As of the meeting on Oct. 21, 59 cases had been confirmed in 28 MSBSD schools, leaving only 19 schools that have not had a confirmed case. Out of the 59 cases, 42 percent have resulted in school closures.

“As we go through cases, there’s lots of information that we take into account. We rely extremely heavily on the community to help to decide what the outcome of each case will be, whether it’s a closure or not. There’s no single metric that decides if a school remains open or is closed,” said Trani. “Sitting in the chair that we’re sitting in with the Health Action Team, we can kind of track what’s happening right now in the Valley to big community events that happened in Anchorage as well as here and then moved to the community, and It feels like they’ve come from the outside in. We can no longer say that there hasn’t been transmission in the school.”

Out of the 17,915.97 students taking courses from MSBSD, 12,120.25 of those students are taking classes in school buildings, accounting for 68 percent of all students. Another 2,319.75 students are taking at-home courses and 3,427.75 students are taking correspondence courses. A total of 318 students have been identified as close contacts, approximately 13.25 students per positive case. Another 29 staff have been identified as close contacts, accounting for 1.3 staff close contacts per positive case. Trani said that contact tracing resources are being focused on elementary schools.

“It’s harder on families of young children to have the disruption than it is for older students and the spread that we see is more prevalent amongst the high school aged students,” said Trani. “It’s safer for us to have longer short term closures with the older students and that’s what you’ve been seeing this week.”