Reply to Covid rise - when to withdraw from day care?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just wanted to say that if you are sending your child to daycare (and no judgment from me if you are -- I get it), you need to behave as though there could be an outbreak at your daycare any day.

I say this because I know a family that contracted Covid from their daycare right before Thanksgiving and almost certainly gave it to their family on Thanksgiving before realizing they had it. Their daycare followed every safety protocol you can imagine -- masks, temp checks, no one allowed in with any symptoms at all, etc. But a teacher tested positive the day before Thanksgiving and by the time people were contacted, multiple families already had symptoms and now there are more than 10 positives, plus more people who have symptoms but have not yet tested positive.

I don't know if daycares are a major source of spread in general. But if Covid gets into a daycare, there is every possibility that it will spread. Who knows -- maybe the teacher who got it was a super spreader, or maybe she got it from an asymptomatic child who was a super spreader. Maybe there is some lapse in their safety measures that hasn't occurred to anyone yet. Who knows? But the point is, if your kid is in daycare (or private school), your family is exposed to many other families and you need to behave accordingly. Act as you would if you were working in an ER or going to work in a grocery store every day. Don't visit elderly relatives, don't take other risks.

Just be smart about it.[/quote]

Right.  I know of a daycare where a class is currently shut down while awaiting test results for one family with Covid symptoms- which has now taken over a week with still no results!  So I guess the bright spot is that if it does come back positive they'll already be over halfway through a 14-day quarantine, but it puts a lot of families in a bind because one family was careless.  With the testing so slow right now, the results are almost meaningless.[/quote]

Wow, you’re judgmental.
On another note...our daycare doesn’t quarantine a class until AFTER a positive is confirmed (i.e., not while awaiting results).  Supposedly, they follow the advice of the health department (VA).  Is this not standard practice?  
We have had 4 confirmed cases in 7 months...all teachers, no kids.[/quote]

That’s what I was about to ask- obviously the child who has taken a test needs to quarantine until they get a test result (family members too). But why would a class quarantine without a confirmed positive case?[/quote]

Yeah it's weird to close while you are awaiting results, unless they were experiencing couch, fever, and shortness of breath.  Like it was obviously covid.  But if we closed every time we were waiting for results, we would never be open.  My daughters friends mom works at NIH and it tested every week....because she can.  [/quote]

Our center (in MD) also doesn't close while awaiting results, although I suppose if they had a child or staff member with very specific symptoms (loss of sense of smell/taste, cough, fever) they might.  But for a kid with a runny nose awaiting test results?  No.  They follow MSDE health department guidelines and communicate promptly any changes in policy based on those.

We're pretty strict otherwise because we can be: WFH, only other indoor place is groceries once/week, didn't see local family for Thanksgiving.  I'd be... not happy if other parents at our center were regularly going out to eat or to the gym or other risky places.[/quote]

I think it depends on the center's interpretation of the guidance and who they get on the line from the health dept when they ask questions.  There was a class at our daycare that was quarantined for a week while a kid awaited test results- turns out that the child was negative.  They had classic cold symptoms- sore throat and runny nose, but that met the two symptom criteria in the MSDE's decision tree to warrant testing.  That guidance also recommends that any close contacts isolate until the person gets test results- so the class was interpreted as "close contacts" and sent home. Most of those kids were tested too and had (negative) results before the child in question got theirs back.

It's tricky because I think the delayed turnaround in results around Thanksgiving is having a chilling effect on testing and notification- the family did the right thing in notifying the center, but no one wants to get a class shut down for a week over a cold![/quote]

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