Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) appears to be changing its policy on when it will report positive cases of COVID-19 in schools.
It will now report every case on its website (vch.ca/covid-19/school-exposures), but it won’t do it until it has first reached those who are identified through contact tracing as being most at risk.
“The school district is working with Vancouver Coastal Health and the people at risk will be reached directly,” said Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, deputy chief medical health officer for VCH in a virtual information meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 30, hosted by the Sea to Sky School District. The meeting was held to try and clear up lingering confusion about the issue.
The priority, he added, has always been and will continue to be reaching the people most at risk first. “Once that’s done, we’ll issue the school district communication and post on the website.”
The root of confusion has been that some health authorities, such as Fraser Health, appear to be reporting all school exposures on its websites while VCH was only reporting positive cases when they could not be certain they reached everyone who was potentially exposed.
Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said last week that all health authorities would be posting school exposure events.
District superintendent Lisa McCullough moderated the meeting with school district staff, families and members of the media invited to send questions ahead of time.
Lysyshyn said VCH wants to protect patient privacy and officials are also worried people would stop getting tested if they were concerned about being identified publicly as having the virus.
“We have all now agreed on a process,” said Lysyshyn. “[B]asically now, if we believe there has been an exposure in the school setting, and we are isolating people in the school setting, we are going to post the public information on our website and we are going to recommend that the school district issues a communication to the school community so that everybody knows that there has been an exposure.”
He said the process has had to be worked out over the last week, admitting that there have been hiccups along the way.
“We’re all doing this for the first time with COVID,” said Lysyshyn. “And although we have a lot of experience with contact tracing and the management of COVID, this is the school setting and people are very interested in this information. So we are trying to balance that and I think, going forward you’ll see a much more unified approach.”
During the meeting, Lysyshyn also said B.C. is officially in the second wave of the virus and while the number of people testing positive is higher now than during the first wave, there are also many more people getting tested than there were in the spring.
“We don’t actually believe that transmission is higher now than it was during the first wave,” he added.
While the highest levels of transmission of COVID-19 has been in Vancouver, the “coastal rural area” that the Sea to Sky is in is also active.
“Howe Sound had been seeing the most [out] of our rural communities, but more recently it’s been taken over by Powell River,” said Lysyshyn.
McCullough, meanwhile, shared statistics about the high number of students who have returned to classrooms in the district. A total of 93 per cent of students came back for in-class instruction. About one per cent withdrew from school and moved to online and six per cent of students opted for a transition program where they have until Oct. 30 to shift from online to in-class learning.
According to the latest data for the BC Centre for Disease Control 46 per cent of infections in age group 0 to 19 during the pandemic occurred during September with kids registering a total of 382 infections last month.
