EVANSVILLE, IND. — People can know how many COVID-19 cases there are in nursing homes, states, counties, a Georgia overnight camp and the Miami Marlins baseball team. But there's no solid plan to offer that data for local schools.
The Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. has created a "COVID-19 Dashboard," but it isn't designed to display the number of cases in schools. The EVSC dashboard offers case data from Vanderburgh County as a whole, citing the Indiana State Department of Health's (ISDH) statewide dashboard as its source.
That's the data EVSC will rely on to decide whether or when to move from mostly in-school instruction to targeted closures, hybrid attendance or virtual instruction.
"We wanted to create something that would be visible so that parents could go on to our website and see that," EVSC spokesman Jason Woebkenberg said.
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But Woebkenberg could not say whether EVSC will be able to show parents and others how many cases and close contacts pop up in a specific school or collectively in the corporation's 40 schools.
"We are still processing things," he said Friday.
ISDH had essentially the same answer when asked whether it will begin offering COVID-19 data collection by school or school district.
"ISDH is working on additional resources to ensure that schools are quickly notified of cases, but those plans are still being developed," ISDH spokeswoman Megan Wade-Taxter said by email Friday.
More: When will EVSC, other Tri-State students go back to school?
Wade-Taxter, who did not make herself available to talk by phone, said later by text that ISDH's data and dashboard team had told her "the numbers of cases can/will be released." But when asked for details, she said plans are still being developed.
Melissa Tines doesn't want to guess.
Tines, a single mother who has three children in EVSC schools, wants to know how many COVID-19 cases emerge in those schools — even if they don't involve her kids. Tines actively follows the ISDH dashboard.
"I would be able to discuss with my kids how to be cautious," she said. "If it was something that became a problem where the number was creeping up, then I may be able to make the decision that school isn't a safe option, and we may have to bring them home."
Jeff and Alyce Anderson, who have two boys at North High School, also would want to know. Noting that he earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and has worked as an industrial engineer, Jeff Anderson put it plainly.
"I want a measurable to tell me if they're doing a good job protecting my kid or not," he said.
Can it be done? Yes
Asked whether EVSC believes parents and others should be able to find out how many COVID-19 cases have been discovered in their children's schools, Woebkenberg didn't have an answer.
"I would have to look into that to see because obviously, this is a different type situation where you’re monitoring health data surrounding COVID-19, but you still have HIPAA requirements as well," he said.
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But the HIPAA Privacy Rule — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — generally does not apply to elementary and secondary schools and does not prohibit the reporting of case statistics without names.
"In most cases, it is sufficient to report the fact that an individual in the school has been determined to have COVID-19, rather than specifically identifying the student who is infected," a U.S. Department of Education report stated in March. "School notification is an effective method of informing parents and eligible students of an illness in the school."
In Tennessee, state Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey said Tuesday the state has no plans to make public its data on the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths at schools as they return to in-person classes.
Sharing that data would be left up to individual school districts, Piercey said.
The ISDH dashboard, upon which EVSC relies, offers a cornucopia of data, including the fact that, as of Saturday, 11.6 percent of COVID-19 cases in Vanderburgh County have involved individuals age 19 or younger.
'Active cases'
EVSC's dashboard may cite ISDH as its source, but the school corporation on Friday was offering one number that ISDH never did — active cases. The Vanderburgh County Health Department's dashboard had been providing that number — but the local agency stopped reporting COVID-19 data last week, ceding control of all local COVID-19 data to ISDH.
The last number for active cases that the county health department reported was 424. EVSC featured that number last week until it posted a new one — 437, a number that never appeared on the health department's dashboard. But ISDH would have it.
Asked whether ISDH had given the number to EVSC outside of the public's view, Woebkenberg said the school corporation is using ISDH data "to show a number so that people can understand just where we're at."
"If you look at (ISDH's) information, you're able to then calculate that based on the past number of days," he said. "You'll have to contact them for a better explanation than I'm probably able to give you from a medical standpoint."
Sometime after EVSC's dashboard offered 437 as the active cases number, it changed its description of the number to "Total Positive Cases in previous 10 days" and removed numbers of cases that would be hypothetically required to change the reopening policy.
Will COVID-19 invade local schools? Yes
There can be little doubt that COVID-19 will show up in local schools. Henderson County Schools Superintendent Marganna Stanley has already acknowledged the neighboring Kentucky school system "can’t prevent COVID-19 from coming into our schools."
In Hancock County, a junior high school student tested positive for the coronavirus after the first day of class, according to an email sent to families. The student was present for part of the first day on Thursday. It was Hancock County students' first time back in school buildings since the coronavirus closed schools statewide in March.
Likewise, last week brought a sobering reminder that bringing hundreds of children together in the same place can lead to an outbreak — and that case numbers for children in group settings can be reported.
Two-hundred and sixty people who attended a June overnight camp in Georgia who tested positive, according to a report released Friday by Georgia health officials and the CDC. Campers were 6 to 19 years old, and many staffers were teenagers. But there's a caveat, and a big one at that: While EVSC requires students to wear masks in many instances, the Georgia camp didn't make campers wear them.
It's not COVID-19 data collection, but the New York Times has more specific projections for EVSC schools than EVSC.
The Times reported Friday that a study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin attempts to quantify the risk students and educators may run at school in every county in the United States. Using a New York Times database of cases to estimate the prevalence of the virus in each county and running a myriad of infection rates, rough projections and estimates together, the Texas study posed a question: "How many infected people might arrive if classes started today?"
The answer: In Vanderburgh County, four people likely would arrive infected in the first week of instruction at a school with 500 people. In a school of 1,000, the number would be nine.
Will the local health department offer data? No
For months, journalists and others interested in detailed local COVID-19 case information went to the Vanderburgh County Health Department's dashboard, which specified how many cases remained active and how many "close contacts" of infected persons were cleared or being monitored.
But no more.
Joe Gries, the local agency's administrator, said Friday that it no longer has that information to share. An ongoing transition of COVID-19 contact tracing in Vanderburgh County from the local agency to the state is now complete, Gries said. He said the data resides with the state, which contracted with Virginia-based Maximus for $43 million annually to do the work.
And the state isn't providing the number of active cases and other data at that level of detail — at least not yet.
"We’ve had a lot of people who have contacted us that had been looking at that (local dashboard) and did utilize that information," Gries said. "We understand it is a loss, but right now, there’s just not anything we can do about it."
Gries said the local health department hopes to eventually "get that (data capacity) back" from the state.
But Gries, who hadn't known about EVSC's dashboard, said parents already will get the school-specific COVID-19 case data they need if they trust the school corporation and the health department to do their jobs.
"(EVSC), working with the health department, will be contacting people who need to isolate. They will contact those families that, maybe their students or their children are close contacts to a positive case, and so people will know," Gries said. "The school corporation, they’re going to deal with that on an individual basis."
But what about the parent who wants to know how many confirmed positive COVID-19 test results and close contacts have turned up among students in his kid's school — even if his kid isn't among them?
"Those people that need to be contacted are told that, 'Your child needs to isolate and has been identified as a close contact,' and so that information will be provided," Gries said.
"But just knowing that there might be two cases in a school doesn’t – if there’s no exposure, then there’s no risk. It's on an individual basis, and who’s in contact with a possible case. That’s how that will be handled."
EVSC's Woebkenberg said the corporation can still close individual schools if COVID-19 cuts a wider swath in them than in others. But asked whether EVSC will have per-school COVID-19 case data, he said the corporation will be in contact with schools.
EVSC will monitor attendance rates, Woebkenberg said, and "how many students have called in, families have called in, to tell us that there is a confirmed positive case or a possible close contact."
The information EVSC does gather could lead to some hard decisions.
"If you had a high outbreak, unfortunately, in one particular school, then you could look at going to closing in-person learning on that school and going to some virtual learning in that school, but maybe another school in our system would stay open," Woebkenberg said.
"If the (COVID-19 case) numbers are consistent enough, unfortunately, across the entire county, it could result in us making a systemwide decision."
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COVID-19: Vanderburgh County, state have no plan to offer pandemic case data by school - Courier & Press
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