COVID-19 protocols for the 2022-2023 school year
This is the third year students and teachers head back to school while the country faces the COVID-19 pandemic. But this time around they can expect a degree of pre-pandemic normalcy. This is because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new COVID-19 guidelines for schools that loosen virus protocols and leave much of the decision-making to families, schools and local officials.
Yahoo News spoke to Dr. Michael Chang, pediatric infectious diseases specialist at UTHealth Houston and Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, on questions people may have about the new CDC guidelines and how COVID-19 protocols have changed this school year.
Video Transcript
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- Today, the CDC updated its COVID guidance to loosen a number of its health recommendations.
DR. MICHAEL CHANG: I think one thing that is important and emphasized in the new CDC recommendations are that we are in a different place in this pandemic than we were certainly at the beginning and even last year. What's changed is that the much larger population of people who have some sort of preexisting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially against severe illness and hospitalization.
The other thing that I would say is now we have had three years of experience looking at how COVID affects children. Overall, we can say that children seem less likely to have severe illness and hospitalization. But at the same time, they can still develop long COVID and some of them do get hospitalized. And so, when you kind of take that whole picture together and then you look at the new CDC recommendations, I think they're trying to give guidance for families to make their own kind of individualized and family decisions for what works best for them.
The biggest changes I would say for the new CDC guidance are that they're not recommending any type of quarantine anymore. And so, if there were an exposure at school as long as children are asymptomatic, then you would stay at school. They're actually recommending that if you stay, you wear a mask for the full 10 days. If you're asymptomatic, that you actually do get a test on day six.
Obviously if you test positive, you would be isolated. The CDC official recommendations do not suggest a testing exit strategy. They say that theoretically if your symptoms are gone, you haven't had fever for 24 hours without taking fever medication, you don't need to test to exit. As a pediatric infectious disease person, I would still recommend though that if your child tests positive or anyone in your family were to test positive, those people really should have negative tests before exiting isolation.
The mask recommendations from the CDC now are based more on hospitalizations, ICU capacity, hospital capacity. But that doesn't mean you're not having a big outbreak. As far as what parents should know, they need to follow their local epidemiology. Each family and parent will have to kind of think about their individual family's risk.
Do they have high risk individuals in their household? Is someone, say, a grandparent with heart disease living with them? In which case, then, they would want to be more cautious about continuing to wear masks, continuing to have some physical distancing, still limiting kind of high risk indoor activities. I do think that parents will need to decide in their own household and in their own kind of risk profile whether or not their child should wear a mask to school.
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