Kentucky will soon publish positive COVID-19 cases by school, Beshear says

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky schools with positive COVID-19 cases will be included in daily coronavirus reporting soon, Gov. Andy Beshear and Dr. Steven Stack said Monday.

Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health, offered his input Monday on Beshear’s recommendation to delay in-person instruction until at least late September and the data the administration relied on to reach that decision during a virtual meeting of the Superintendents Advisory Council.

As districts throughout Kentucky prepare to begin the 2020-21 school year, many are following Beshear’s recommendation to delay reopening classrooms until at least Sept. 28 given the recent escalation of COVID-19 cases and start the school year with distance learning.

Some districts have stuck with their plans to reopen schools as an option for families to start the school year in the coming weeks.

No matter when schools decide to offer classroom instruction, the Kentucky Department for Public Health will include positive COVID-19 cases in schools in its daily reporting, Stack said.

“Our goal is to have a transparency at the state level and at the local level that protects the individual students’ health information and identity but can give parents the information that they deserve,” Beshear said Monday.

Further details will be provided Tuesday, he said. Stack also committed to meeting with superintendents during their weekly statewide webcast on Tuesday.

Schools are already required to report outbreaks of lice and of diseases like strep throat, Beshear and Stack said.

The state currently reports cases connected to nursing homes and behavioral health hospitals, Stack said.

Schools with students or staff who test positive for COVID-19 will be required to notify their local health departments, which will then begin contact tracing, Stack said. That information will be collected by the state for reporting the following day, he said.

“The schools will be given the opportunity to get out with their messaging to their school community and inform the entire school community if they have active disease,” Stack said.

Parents deserve to know about COVID-19 outbreaks in their kids’ schools and to ask questions about the quarantine process, Beshear said. Sports teams should also report active COVID-19 cases to families, he said.

“I can’t imagine, as a parent, the betrayal I’d feel if my son or daughter’s school had positive tests but didn’t tell me as a parent, whether it was in their grade or not,” Beshear said.

“I believe every parent, no matter what they think is the right decision right now, viscerally feels how I feel, that they should at least have all the information. And that means as a state government we’ve got to set up the system that provides it.”

He worries that some districts planning or contemplating reopening their schools are in some of the areas hit hardest by COVID-19 based on state and federal analyses.

“No matter what your plan is, it can’t work at the level of the virus right now,” Beshear said.

Regardless of when schools reopen for the fall, districts can prepare for guidance from the state that includes the “low-hanging fruit” of masking, social distancing and hand hygiene for the near future, Stack said.

“I think the fall depends on if everybody’s wearing their masks and doing social distancing and following those other measures because what I will tell you for certainty – there’s very little I can say for certain, but this I can – there will be no vaccine in 2020,” he said, noting he hopes a vaccine will be available by 2021. “There is no vaccine in 2020.”

The public health commissioner’s presentation Monday comes as some school districts ready to welcome students back in their classrooms for the first time since March regardless of Beshear’s latest recommendation to postpone such plans until late September.

Some school leaders have asked for more refined COVID-19 data to better plan for the upcoming school year.

“I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that it was frustrating to hear after seven months of a pandemic that we still can’t gather much of the data you alluded to earlier in your presentation,” Kenton County Schools Superintendent Henry Webb said. “… I would think that we’d be able to get on top of that much more significantly.”

But Stack said Monday that such detailed information is difficult to obtain from labs that process COVID-19 tests and are only required to report positive cases.

The state fought “a huge uphill battle” to get the information it currently does from labs, many of which now include the total numbers of negative COVID-19 tests in their reports of positive cases, he said.

Even those reports have to be culled for duplicate cases to get an accurate total of new COVID-19 infections, he said.

Providing detailed COVID-19 data by county or zip code “is frequently just not possible” in Kentucky, he said.

“Because we don’t get access to, on a consistent or reliable basis, the total number of tests run, it makes it harder … to generate some kinds of data,” Stack said.

The Kentucky Department of Education has scheduled calls with leaders of districts considering whether to resume in-person instruction. Interim Education Commissioner Kevin Brown was late for Monday’s Superintendents Advisory Council meeting because of such a conference call.

Since Wednesday morning, 19 public school districts had been contacted by state education and health leaders in hopes of dissuading them from reopening their classrooms to start the 2020-21 school year.

“They’ve all been positive calls,” Brown said during the meeting. “That doesn’t mean every district is saying they’re going to abide by the governor’s recommendation, but it’s been a good communication back and forth.”

Stack said he supported schools safely reopening for the start of 2020-21 when the state released its “Healthy at Schools” guidance document in late June, a time when COVID-19 numbers had stabilized.

In the weeks since, Kentucky has seen its COVID-19 caseload triple from about 50 new cases per million per day to around 150 new cases per million per day, he said.

“In two weeks we are at the exponential incline, and so we took action,” Stack said. “That’s when we put in the mask mandate. That’s when we shut the bars, we restricted the restaurant capacity and we put in the 10 or less group requirement.”

The state’s new COVID-19 cases are beginning to plateau, but school districts and universities reopening their campuses may jeopardize that during “a very active level of disease” in Kentucky, he said.

“It is as if we have tinder boxes scattered virtually everywhere across the state and all you have to do is pour a little gasoline on them and they’re going to flare into a big brush fire, and if we’re unlucky it’ll get further out of control and become a big forest fire,” Stack said.

Even schools that open later will risk spreading COVID-19 in their communities, he said. Stack suggested waiting and learning from school reopening experiences in other states before resuming classroom instruction in Kentucky.

“I just feel an obligation as the public health person in the discussion to make sure people know that means more people in hospitals,” he said. “It does mean more deaths.”

“All of us are going to have to share those decisions because there will be consequences, both good and bad, no matter what path we go down,” he said.

Districts that have been contacted by state public education and health leaders about 2020-21 school reopening plans since Wednesday according to a list provided by the Kentucky Department of Education are: