The Indiana state health department is relaxing COVID quarantine guidance for schools, but some schools are sticking with the old system.
Until now, close contacts of students or staff who test positive had to quarantine for at least a week — it’s two weeks unless they get a negative test and wear a mask. But updated guidance issued on Wednesday says if a school has and enforces a mask requirement all day, contacts don’t have to quarantine unless they develop symptoms.
The rule for anyone who tests positive is unchanged: you have to quarantine for 10 days, and go at least a full day without symptoms.
Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents associate director Robert L. Taylor says schools appreciate the additional flexibility. He says quarantines have been an even bigger factor than rising infection rates in driving absentee rates as high as 60% in some schools. At least five school districts have returned to online classes in at least one building because so many students or teachers were absent.
But Taylor says the school districts he’s talked to are divided between those who are embracing the new rule and those sticking with the stricter quarantine rule, at least for now.
In Hamilton County, for instance, both the Noblesville Schools and the Westfield-Washington Schools already have mask mandates. Within hours of the new guidance, Noblesville announced it would revise its quarantine rules accordingly, while Westfield announced it would keep the stricter standard in place while it confers with principals, administrators, and doctors at Riverview Health.
State health commissioner Kristina Box hinted at the change last week, pointing to a Duke University study which found North Carolina schools which required masks had a COVID transmission rate of less than two-percent.
More than 10,000 K-12 students across Indiana have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last three weeks, about a quarter of the total for all of last year.
2 comments
Kristina Box is a moron. She ignores the studies that show kids are the least vulnerable to any of the Covid strains. They are most vulnerable to generic Flu. Most of the kids in hospital due to “Covid” are there for RSV. Possibly because of the mask mandates.
According to the doctor who invented the current “vaccine” idea it is a giant mistake to mandate the “vaccines.” he states that the “vaccines” will cause a resistant virus to emerge that cannot be treated.
Public health officials are lying to us. Stop listening to them!!!
Do some research on your own. Avoid the lame stream medias and their cancel culture. The information is out there but you have to go look for it and use your own brain to analyze it and make your own personal medical decision for yourself in consultation with your doctor.
Also, the masks do little if anything. A properly worn mask that seals around the nose and under the chin and is made to the necessary standards provides some protection if changed after each use.
If these things work so great against a virus why don’t we issue these doilies to our troops for Chemical/Biological/Radiological/Nuclear training? They don’t because they don’t work and most of the people I’ve seen wearing the doilies do so in a way that makes them useless.