B.C. parents demand faster notifications about COVID-19 exposures in school

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Some B.C. parents are demanding more transparency about COVID-19 exposures in schools and are not convinced changes promised this week are strong enough.

When students and staff returned to school earlier this month, the province took a different approach to contact tracing, saying it would no longer issue school-wide letters. Instead, for the first two weeks of school, clusters and outbreaks would be reported.

On Tuesday, after hearing from concerned parents and educators, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said they’ve recognized “parents do need an authoritative source to have an understanding of what’s happening in their children’s schools.”

“If your child has COVID, if your child has been exposed to somebody with COVID in the school system, you will be notified,” Henry explained, adding the goal is to have the system up and running by the end of the week.

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Kyenta Martins with the group Safe Schools Coalition BC says that’s a start, but “we really want to get a picture of what is happening in schools.”

“How many cases are in a school [and] when they occurred, so that we know when it’s safe to send our kids to school, or if we hold them back for a week. It just helps us make decisions for our family’s health.”

Martins, a mother to two girls attending East Vancouver’s Tyee Elementary, says the group has filed Freedom of Information requests with more than half of B.C.’s 60 districts. She says every exposure needs to be quickly reported.

“I know of someone who just found out about a case. Her child was a close contact during the first week of school … Those days are crucial when you’re in a pandemic and you’re trying to make a decision as to whether your child should be going to school and possibly exposing others, or be exposed.”

She says there are “concerns we still will not have full transparency.”

Martins says kids do catch COVID-19 and points to data showing transmission happens in schools elsewhere in the world.

“We have seen it in the States, we’ve seen it in the U.K., we’ve seen it in Israel. It’s happening in our schools, too. It would be a lot more helpful if we could recognize that, if our government would recognize that and help us mitigate the problem, rather than pretend it’s not happening.”

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For her part, Henry has long said schools were not significant sources of COVID-19 transmission. Studies from Vancouver Coastal Health found fewer than eight per cent of COVID-19 cases were acquired inside the school environment last year.

In Fraser Health, which includes the Surrey School District, 87 per cent of school-associated cases were found to have been caught in community or household transmission, and not from a school setting.

The COVID-19 Immunity Task Force says there is no greater risk to school staff getting sick from COVID-19 in a school compared to their community.

However, that was before the Delta variant, prompting more calls for safety measures and notification systems for parents.

“It does take time to follow up on each individual case. And sometimes that can take longer than you expect. But you will be notified and public health teams are prioritizing our schools because we know how important it is to make sure that children are safely in schools,” Henry said.

With files from Nikitha Martins, Sonia Aslam, and Martin MacMahon