In-person elementary students had higher COVID rate than remote peers, Wichita data show
As Wichita’s school board weighs a proposal to send students back to in-person classes, the district’s data show in-person elementary students had a higher COVID-19 case rate than their remote peers.
An analysis by The Eagle of COVID-19 case data from Wichita Public Schools found that in-person elementary students were diagnosed with the coronavirus disease at a rate 228% higher than remote elementary students.
Wichita schoolchildren have lower case rates than the wider community.
The Board of Education meets Monday evening, when it is expected to decide on learning models for the second semester. All elementary students, with few exceptions, have been learning online only since early December. Secondary students have been remote since the start of the 2020-21 academic year.
Administrators plan to recommend returning elementary students to the classroom five days a week, except for those children whose parents already opted to keep them online, Superintendent Alicia Thompson said Friday in an email obtained by The Eagle. Under the proposal, secondary students would attend blended classes — a hybrid of in-person and online learning — if their parents previously opted for them to be in-person.
Athletes would apparently still be required to choose between playing their sport while taking online classes or quitting the sport to attend school face-to-face.
When high numbers of cases and quarantines among staff led to school closures in the fall, district officials blamed the community and called for other local governments to take tougher action.
“We haven’t seen the spread within our schools,” Terri Moses, the USD 259 director of safety and environmental services, said on Friday. “We’ve seen community spread.”
But per-capita case numbers among the district’s estimated 7,308 staff were nearly double the community’s rate for much of the fall semester, according to an analysis by The Eagle of USD 259’s case reports through Dec. 22.
Between when teachers returned to work and the week that classes started, staff had a case rate that was about 1% lower than the Sedgwick County rate, according to data from USD 259 and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
But from the week after classes started through the week before Thanksgiving, school staff had a case rate about 96% higher than that of Sedgwick County as a whole, the numbers show.
Moses said the higher case rate among staff was The Eagle’s “interpretation” of the data.
While students had lower case rates than the larger community, elementary students who attended in-person classes were diagnosed at a significantly higher rate than their peers who learned remotely, The Eagle found.
Every week between Sept. 5 and Nov. 27, in-person students had a higher rate of cases than remote students. For the entire time frame, the in-person case rate was about 228% higher than the remote rate.
After this story was originally published, a school spokesperson said there is the possibility of some parents not reporting COVID cases to the district.
“There could be instances of remote parents not reporting cases of COVID to the school, especially if their child is attending classes remotely and feel well enough to continue to participate,” Susan Arensman said in an email. “Your story is based only on what is reported to the district, which is likely not an accurate reflection of the actual number of student cases.”
Prior to December, the district had about 13,000 elementary students attending face-to-face classes and about 9,000 elementary students learned remotely.
The per-capita rates for district staff and in-person elementary students both peaked during the week of Nov. 7-13, after which the district canceled classes for Thanksgiving week.
That week, Sedgwick County’s population had a rate of 7.10 new cases per 1,000 people. Wichita school staff had a rate of 16.01 per 1,000 people.
Remote elementary students had a rate of 0.44 new cases per 1,000 people. In-person elementary students had a rate of 2.69 per 1,000 people.
The White House COVID-19 Task Force classifies its red zone as any rate greater than one new case per 1,000 people per week.
When asked if returning students to school would lead to more cases and quarantines, Moses said she was not going to jump to that conclusion. However, if cases and quarantines do increase, “we will have to pivot again” she said.
Vaccines and school
Speaking during a Sedgwick County town hall on vaccines last week, county health officer Dr. Garold Minns and infectious disease specialist Dr. Maggie Hagan expressed hope.
“Unfortunately, despite everything we’ve talked about — mask wearing, social distancing, closing business, avoiding big gatherings — none of that has really seemed to impact the numbers like we would like to see,” Hagan said. “So really the only thing I see as the way out of this is the vaccine.”
Health officials have struggled to enforce mask mandates and other pandemic guidance, which have faced strong opposition from the public, including a federal lawsuit.
“It (the vaccine) is the only hope we have of getting our economy back on its feet, our society back on its feet, in the short term,” Minns said. “If we didn’t have the vaccine, the only tools we have are the tools we’ve been using. And as Dr. Hagan referred to, it certainly isn’t killing this virus, it isn’t making it go away, it’s just holding it at bay.”
Still, vaccines have not yet been made available to teachers or students. School staff are in the second group of the state’s inoculation plan, which is expected to start in late January. Children are grouped with the general public in the last phase of the plan, which is expected to start after the school year ends.
The vaccines have not been tested on children, who don’t seem to get as severe of an illness, “so I don’t think would could ethically give it to children until we have some studies showing it’s effective (in children),” Minns said.
Children have lower case rates than the wider community, though teenagers have contracted the illness at a higher rate than younger kids.
Medical experts caution that children can still spread the infection to more vulnerable family members.
Hagan said that when she asked hospital patients — the ones who are awake and able to talk — where they think they were exposed to the virus, a growing number say it was a family member.
“Many times it was a college-aged kid or even a younger child who had very mild symptoms — they didn’t even know they had COVID — and yet the adult in the house got it, either the parent or the grandparent, and they’re who end up in the hospital,” Hagan said.
“That’s why I’m so excited about vaccinating the general public,” Hagain said, “is because sometimes these otherwise healthy people who get a mild case of COVID — the answer I get is: ‘What’s the big deal, I just had the sniffles, sore throat, lost my taste and smell and I feel fine’ — but the big deal is they can transmit it to someone else who gets very ill.
“And very rarely, some young, health person — and we have unfortunately seen people in their late teens and even 20s die of COVID here in this community — sometimes those young, healthy people get a very severe case too.”
Contributing: Michael Stavola of The Eagle.
This story was originally published January 10, 2021 at 3:31 PM.