PORTLAND, Ore. — In briefings Tuesday, Multnomah County Health Department officials said they're trying to minimize the spread of the virus while keeping kids in the classroom.
It's a tough balancing act, and they're learning as they go.
On Tuesday, Dr. Jennifer Vines, health officer for the tri-county area, said the return to in-person learning "coincided with probably the worst timing in the pandemic".
Across Multnomah County schools, thousands of staff and students sit at home in quarantine— including over 1,300 from Reynolds High School after four people initially tested positive last week.
There isn't a huge outbreak at the school but because too many kids were out for "potential exposure," administrators made the call to go online. They didn't have the staff to call every individual close contact and tell them to quarantine, or enough teachers to handle both remote and in-person learning.
Public health leaders said it shows how staffing shortages in schools and on buses make contact tracing a challenge.
"There may be more children excluded than were truly exposed and that's what we're trying to limit," said Multnomah County Communicable Disease Manager Lisa Ferguson.
Multnomah County health officials talked about that and other COVID-related school issues with reporters and county commissioners Tuesday. They repeated often that, alongside school districts, they're still learning.
"We've taken local data and national data and talked through different scenarios and really gotten down to: what do we recommend?" Ferguson assured.
"The next six to eight weeks, there's a lot of deep learning we're planning on doing to help mitigate spread and keep kids in school," Multnomah County Public Health Director Jessica Guernsey said. "This is an area we're spending the most time on to understand what's going on so we can modify and support the schools."
They stress the importance of seating charts and layered safety measures to scale back quarantines and keep kids in school.
"Our numbers are in fact relatively low as far as the number of exposures," Ferguson told commissioners. "What's most important is with the number of exposures we’ve seen, we’ve seen very little evidence of any transmission happening within schools."
Although, Multnomah County Health Department is looking into five schools where they think COVID-19 spread— they refused to name the schools on Tuesday.
Testing is one layer in avoiding large quarantines, but county leaders recognize it needs to be more accessible.
"We're looking at the balance," Guernsey added. "Testing is not the only pathway in terms of continuity of education and keeping kids in school."
Public health officials said vaccines for young kids will be another pathway to keep kids in school and hopefully prevent another situation like Reynolds.
"We can talk about closing school for public health reasons but that's not going to keep kids from mixing," Dr. Vines said, "If anything they're better off in school for the learning and in a structured environment where people are reminding them to wear their masks and to stay apart. That's part of what we're struggling with."