With Park City schools, spread the word and not the virus

We are entering dark days in Utah related to the Coronavirus. Each day, and every day, over 2,000 people are testing positive for Covid-19. That will only get worse as we enter flu season and people misattribute symptoms. In our schools, teachers are doing the best they can. Parents are doing the best they can. However, that doesn’t stop the reality. People are getting sick.

A couple of weeks ago we heard the story about high school basketball tryouts. Normally,

Call to Action: If you or someone in your household tests
positive for Covid-19, pick up the phone and spread the word.
Don’t wait for someone else to do it.

Contact tracing during the widening spread of Covid-19 is hard,
if not impossible at this point.

If you test positive

Remember who you could have exposed in the last week or so,
then call and inform them so they can get tested. They also need
to look out for signs and symptoms.

If your child (a PCSD student) tests positive

Remember who your child could have exposed in the last week
or so, then call in inform them so they can start looking for signs
and symptoms. Also, call your PCSD school secretary.

All positive test results automatically get shared with the
Summit County Health Department, according to a nurse at one
of our testing sites. Summit County reports it to Utah’s
Department of Health. Your positive case becomes a number

entered into county and state systems and third-party
dashboards.

On August 24, 2020, PCSD sent an email to district parents
announcing new healthAttend software, an attendance
portal which can also help track Covid-19 cases. It read:
‘Park City School District is implementing new tools to
help ease communication between parents and the
schools regarding absence reporting and potential
symptom monitoring from home. If your student will be
out of school, we ask that you use our online system to
report their absence(s). This greatly alleviates the strain
on front office staff during critical times of the morning
routine and enables us to focus our attention on COVID
precautions and getting your child safely to class. It also
helps our nurses monitor symptoms and cases, in an effort
to mitigate potential illness outbreaks.’

In reality, healthAttend is a stand-alone database that PCSD
nurses use to enter Covid-19 cases. Is not ready for parents
quite yet. HealthAttend became a company just one month
before PCSD decided to adopt its graphic database. There
is no interface between healthAttend and PCSD. Parents
still have to call and email school Attendance Secretaries
to report an absence or illness, then talk to the school
nurse to discuss and confirm a Covid-19 positive case.
According to one of the district’s Attendance Secretaries,
‘HealthAttend is an external program that does not link to
our school software therefore requiring manual entry.’

After a school nurse confirms the case, he/she enters it into
healthAttend. Late each night, the healthAttend system
gets refreshed, so data entered today is displayed tomorrow
for most people. District administrators have also
confirmed this information and that healthAttend is
stand-alone and displays only an aggregate of
school-entered numbers. After all that, the school
administration decides who to email about quarantining
other students who were in contact with your child during
school hours.

PCSD protocol Recently, a PCSD student tested positive.
The parent entered the information into healthAttend, but
PCSD did not see that entry. The parent called the school
right away, but it was on a Sunday. By the time the school
applied protocols and procedures and finished notifying
parents whose kids were exposed during unmasked time
together, it was late on that Monday afternoon after
exposed students were back in school, possibly spreading
this virus in classrooms and hallways.

Timely notification and action is what can prevent viral spread.

Have school protocols changed?
Yes. There will be no more quarantine unless unmasked
exposure happens.

PCSD changes protocols as often as the state changes them.

According to the state as of 12/3/20, students may return to
school before 14 days of quarantine only if ALL three
criteria below are met:

1. The school verifies the person who was exposed and the
   person who tested positive were both wearing a face mask
   as defined by the State Public Health Order on masks in
   schools. (Our student athletes were exposed without
   masks.)
2. The person who was exposed tests negative for
   COVID-19 at least 7 days after the last day of exposure.
3. The person who was exposed does not have symptoms of
   COVID-19.

On 12/3/20, Dr. Gildea issued a letter to teachers stating:
‘…With Mask to Mask contact, there will be 0 school
based quarantine – effective immediately – other than
lunchtime contact. The social distance in a classroom is
not a factor in whether or not to quarantine re: seating
chart. So, the only contact tracing schools will be doing is
potential lunchtime or school activity based exposure….If
our athletes practice WITH masks, there is 0 quarantine for
team based exposure.’

Where can I find real Covid-19 case counts?

Case counts reported at the state, county, and school district
levels vary because of the different procedures and timelines for

notification. You can find PCSD case counts at both the state
and county level. Often they report higher numbers than PCSD.
This varies. Word of mouth spreads faster than computer data in
the case of PCSD. Teachers may have a more accurate count
than healthAttend given their proximity to information in the
school.

State Dashboard

Summit County Dashboard

PCSD healthAttend Dashboard

It’s up to friends and community to call each other, through
word of mouth, if we want to notify and learn quickly about
Covid-19 cases.

Call everyone you know who may have been exposed—the
old-fashioned way! Post it on social media the new-fashioned
way! There’s no shame in it. This is a public health concern. To
meet the challenge of not spreading this virus, a phone call is
quicker than entering data into a void and hoping it goes

somewhere. It’s faster than a PCSD email. The most
responsible party is YOU.

Let’s pick up the phone, reach out to friends, and spread the
word, not the virus! Love our community.