The Bulloch County Schools have adapted their COVID-19 precautions to the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, allowing some students, teachers and others who previously would have stayed home for 14-day quarantines to return after seven or 10 days.

From the Aug. 17 start of classes for the current school year through Wednesday morning, the school district, now with 10,891 students and 1,594 employees, has seen 189 confirmed positive COVID-19 cases. Individuals actually diagnosed with the coronavirus are not sent into “quarantine” but instead are required to “isolate” for at least 10 days. That part hasn’t changed.

However, people who come into “close contact” with someone with COVID-19 were previously required to stay away from in-person school for 14 days as a precautionary quarantine. From the beginning of the school year until Wednesday, the Bulloch schools reported 1,761 instances of individuals having to quarantine, some more than once.

But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, updated its guidelines Friday to allow shorter quarantines under certain conditions while still recommending a 14-day quarantine.  The Georgia Department of Public Health, or DPH, then adopted the guidelines and notified school superintendents, including Bulloch County’s Charles Wilson.

The local school system posted an explanation of the new guidelines on www.bulloch.k12.ga.us and the schools’ websites Monday and notified parents.

“Superintendent Wilson shared the updates with the Human Resources, Special Education, and Public Relations Departments of our school district, and we each submitted our updated local protocols and communications to him for review prior to implementation,” Hayley Greene, the Bulloch County Schools public relations director, said in an email Wednesday.

In other words, the decisions involved were made by staff members and reviewed by the superintendent. Wilson had previously emphasized that the school system was following DPH and CDC guidelines, not creating its own policy, and Monday’s change was announced as the schools adopting the updated guidelines.

Two new options

The CDC’s new guidelines allow a quarantine to be limited to seven days if the quarantined person takes a COVID-19 PCR test or antigen test after five full quarantine days and receives a negative result and does not experience any symptoms any of the seven days.

For individuals who have come into close contact with someone with COVID-19 but who choose not to take a PCR or antigen test, the quarantine can be limited to 10 days if the person has no symptoms during any of those 10 days.

The school system’s online notice states: “Bulloch County Schools' nurses and human resources personnel have updated the school district's protocols for students and employees accordingly. The new guidelines are retroactive and can be applied to those currently under quarantine.”

The notice advised quarantined school employees and parents of quarantined students interested in returning before the 14 days are up to talk to the employee’s supervisor or the student's school nurse.

Some special rules apply to quarantined student athletes. They may return to practice under either the seven-day or 10-day option if they wear a mask appropriately and maintain six feet of distance from others while at practice. But a quarantined student will not be allowed to return to athletic competition until the full 14 days have passed, according to the school system’s online summary.

Already fewer out

More previously quarantined individuals have already returned to school this week than would have under the previous, fixed 14-day requirement, Greene said.

“Yes, it’s already being used by our school nurses,” she said. “In some instances it was retroactive –one clarification we got from DPH was that it could be retroactive – so ones that were already on quarantine when those new guidelines came out, they had the choice of looking to see if they would qualify for ether the seven or the 10.”

The revised guidelines went into effect just two weeks before the end of first semester and the start of the holiday break. After leaving school at the end of the day Dec. 18, students will return Jan. 6 for second semester.

Meanwhile, for the past three weeks, the number of COVID-19 cases confirmed each week among the school system’s students and employees has fallen back into the single digits. After rising to a recent peak of 20 cases the week of Nov. 8-14 and 19 new cases the week of Nov. 15-21, the numbers fell to eight cases the week of Nov. 22-28, six new cases last week and four new cases so far this week.

Soon after the school year started, the weekly number of new cases reached a high of 23 the week of Aug.  23-29 and then stayed in the double digits for four weeks before falling to four cases Oct. 4-10 and then increasing again.

The number of individuals sent into quarantine has fluctuated, from highs of 284 the week of Aug. 23-29 and 179 the week of Nov. 8-14, down to 23 newly quarantined individuals last week. So far this week there have been 48 individuals newly quarantined, as of Wednesday afternoon.

But also as of Wednesday, a total of 53 people remained currently quarantined from school, so only a few had continued on quarantine from the previous week. All of these numbers are from the “COVID-19 Cases and Exposures” dashboard that Greene maintains at www.bulloch.k12.ga.us.

Previous attempt

After parents and social services professionals raised concerns about negative effects of long-term and repeated quarantines, the Bulloch County Board of Education had voted unanimously Oct. 8 to exempt students who were wearing face masks when they came into “close contact” and would continue to wear them.

But Georgia DPH Commissioner Dr. Kathleen E. Toomey rejected that local effort to reduce quarantines as a violation of the state’s emergency orders. Wilson then put the attempted local change on hold until the board rescinded it by a 5-2 vote Oct. 23.

Close contact continues to be defined by the CDC as having been within six feet of someone who has COVID-19 for a total of 15 minutes or more, having shared eating or drinking utensils with that person or having been sneezed or coughed on by them.