On Friday, Marin County health officials, noting that 1 in 20 to 25 county residents is currently infected with COVID-19, announced a similar recommendation. They advised schools to no longer send any notification of exposure, but rather advise parents to simply keep an eye out for symptoms.
The North Bay county also went a step further than Palo Alto, saying students and staff exposed in a classroom setting do not need to test, leaving testing as a recommendation only after exposure in high-risk activities like close-contact sports or child care settings.
The assumption of the recommendations is “we’re all exposed to COVID,” said county schools Superintendent Mary Jane Burke, and that schools are still a safe place to be. “It begins to take us into the endemic vs. the pandemic. I think it’s the right thing.”
At the same time, the inability to track individual cases has left districts and counties unable to count in-school transmissions. Under previous strains, few cases of in-school transmission occurred, reinforcing that in-person instruction presented a relatively low risk of catching the virus.
Currently, Bay Area counties can’t say whether there are more cases coming from exposure inside classrooms than before or whether students and staff are getting the coronavirus in the community.