Dr. Grimesey's Statement on K-5 Returning
Since our students returned to school in August, Moore County Schools has learned a lot about keeping our students and employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our experience shows that our infection rates and quarantines have increased ONLY after summer break, Halloween and Thanksgiving. The rates always decrease during prolonged periods when school is in session. Our experience also shows that compliance with COVID-19 restrictions and protocols is much stricter and more consistent in our schools than it is almost anywhere else in our community outside our health care and nursing home facilities. And it just so happens that our experience aligns with emerging conclusions by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, NCDHHS, the ABC Science Collaborative led by the Duke University Clinical Research Institute, the American Pediatrics Association and our local public health department partners that COVID-19 transmission is much more likely to occur among adults than it does among children and between children and adults.
While we must be mindful of a possible post-Christmas resurgence during the second to fourth weeks of January, trends over the past two weeks show clear evidence that our community and our region have progressed beyond the post-Thanksgiving surge that they experienced through the final week of November and the first two weeks of December. Moore County's daily infections per 10,000 residents declined by 15 per day between December 17-30. Thirteen of 14 counties across our region experienced declines in their infection rates during the same two weeks.
The high number of school district quarantines is still resulting almost exclusively from student and staff exposures that occur outside of school. Remember that almost all quarantined students and staff members remain healthy, never develop any symptoms, and continue to learn or teach throughout their quarantine periods. Moreover, our monthly student and employee absentee rates for September through November were as good or better than the same rates during the same pre-COVID-19 months of 2019. Therefore, quarantining represents little more than shifting more modest numbers of students to remote learning and more modest numbers of teachers to remote teaching. Rapid isolation and quarantining remain key practices that enable us to keep the vast majority of our students and employees safely in school.