As teachers and students prepare for the beginning of the school year, the provincial government gave an update yesterday on the back to school plan. Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Robert Strang described how schools would be dealing with cases of COVID-19.

If a COVID case is identified, public health will be looking to identify who was in contact with the person who contracted the virus, and for how long. Once that information is determined, people will be placed in three groups – high risk, moderate risk and low risk.

Someone considered at high risk would be a person who was in a close and prolonged contact with a confirmed case of COVID, meaning 15 minutes or more. The investigation will also look into the 48 hours before the patient felt their first symptoms. 

Moderate risk is someone who has not been in prolonged contact with the person who’s got COVID and they’ve kept two metres or six feet of physical distance from them. Low risk would be someone who’s had limited or casual contact with a confirmed case. This could be someone who was walking past the person with COVID, in a hallway for example, or any common area.

People at high and moderate risk will be sent home, required to self-isolate for 14 days and get tested. Even if test results come back negative, people have to complete the two-week quarantine. Those at low risk don’t have to isolate and can keep going to school.

Regarding guidelines for school closures, Public Health said it will consult with school administration and also provide its own recommendations. “We would close down the whole school only if we felt there was increased risk to all staff and students,” Dr. Strang said. “It’s much more likely that we’re going to be in a situation where we’re closing down a classroom because there’s a case within that cohort.”

Over the last few weeks, the government had been criticized for its lack of details on how it would deal with COVID-19 cases in schools. But Inverness MLA and member of the opposition party Allan MacMaster said that even with the latest update, his constituents continue to have several concerns.

“I think from a very simple perspective, if a young person has the sniffles, what do they do?” he said. “We’re hearing stories now when a child in childcare who has the sniffles is told to go home and get tested. We’re hearing that there’s wait times, maybe 3 days to get a test to completed and another 3 days to get the result. So, that means that you’ve got a child who is missing out. If this holds true for the school year, from primary to 12, that means you have a child who is missing out on their education, school, during that period and means that a parent or parents, they may be impacted, they may not be able to go to work if they have to stay home with their child. So, it’s impacting their ability to earn pay, it’s impacting the productivity of the workplace. Their employers who would be depending on those parents being able to come to work. There is more cost to tax players because it’s often the government that’s trying to help people with tax dollars who can’t go to work. Sometimes through no fault of their own, they may be waiting to get a test. So, my biggest concern is the government’s ability and the system that they have in place to conduct tests quickly and efficiently because otherwise there’s going to be tremendous disruption at school and in the workplace.”

Click here to watch CHNE’s extended interview with MLA Allan MacMaster.