More than 80% of CMS schools had at least one COVID-19 case. Fewer than 10 report quarantines.
At the end of the first full week of school, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools reported 462 COVID-19 cases among students and staff, with 148 of 178 schools reporting at least one case.
That’s among 143,621 students and 19,106 employees for the week of Aug. 28 and Sept. 3.
Fewer than 10 schools reported that at least 25 of their students had actively quarantined within the past two weeks.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg leaders have said they hope to avoid widespread quarantines in the district with strict rules around masks to cut down on the spread of COVID-19.
Only two schools had COVID clusters in the past 28 days, the district reported. A cluster is defined as five or more potentially linked cases within 14 days.
The Observer reported Monday that while cases continue to increase, Mecklenburg County’s COVID-19 rates are showing signs of slowing for the first time in weeks, according to new data from the county health department.
The countywide average is 693.8 new cases per 100,000 residents, based on positive coronavirus test results from Aug. 19 to Sept. 1. That number is slightly up from the previous two weeks’ average rate of 688.3.
How schools report COVID cases
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ return-to-classrooms safety plan includes telling parents and guardians about any positive COVID-19 cases they know about in their child’s school. The notifications don’t always mean there’s an active outbreak or that a family member was exposed to someone sick at school.
Aside from school-wide notification (often sent by email by principals as a letter from county health department leaders), a separate notification will be sent when officials believe an individual student or staff member was exposed to the virus.
The process typically begins with a health care provider or COVID-19 testing provider notifying the local health department of recent positive test results. This notification is based on a person’s home county, meaning if a Charlotte resident takes a test away from home and the result is positive, Mecklenburg County officials are supposed to be notified.
Contact tracing and case investigation — the process of determining who might have been exposed, where exposure occurred and for how long, and then notifying individuals who may need to quarantine or be tested — will vary.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools updates weekly a public dashboard that shows how many new cases were detected among students and staff, and how many people were instructed to quarantine, among other data. The county health department updates its data on active local outbreaks and clusters weekly too. And the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services identifies clusters of cases in day care centers and at schools every Tuesday.
A school that reports multiple cases of COVID-19 isn’t automatically classified as having an outbreak or cluster. Generally, North Carolina health monitoring guidelines consider a site to have a cluster if five or more people over a two-week period have tested positive and it appears the cases are linked or that transmission occurred among those individuals.
This story was originally published September 7, 2021 at 8:32 PM.
