Roughly half of cases not reported on school COVID-19 dashboard

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Wednesday found that up to a year after an initial coronavirus infection, 1 in 4 adults aged 65 and older had at least one potential long COVID health problem, compared with 1 in 5 younger adults. Photo: CDC

PARK CITY, Utah — The Utah Department of Health (UDOH) recently added a color-coded threshold level to their school COVID-19 dashboard.

The new feature offers added context surrounding which schools are approaching a Test to Stay event.

Utah law requires schools to do a Test to Stay event when:

• Schools with 1,500 or more students have 2% of their students test positive for COVID-19 within the previous 14 days.
• Schools with fewer than 1,500 students have 30 students test positive for COVID-19 within the previous 14 days.

During a Test to Stay event, schools are legally required to conduct testing of all students.

Those listed in red are schools that have met or exceeded the Test to Stay event requirements. Those schools listed in yellow are schools that are more than halfway to meeting the requirements and schools in green are less than halfway to meeting the requirements for Test to Stay.

All schools in Park City’s district are currently in the green threshold level.

However, in the last two weeks, only 51.3% of cases among 5-17 years old have been linked to a school and are displayed in the online dashboard according to UDOH. Therefore, recent data is likely less accurate than data in previous time periods when more cases were able to be linked to schools by interview.

“School-associated cases are identified through interviews with cases by the Local Health Departments, and only school-associated cases that have been linked to a school are displayed,” UDOH said.

“People who refuse or are unable to be interviewed are not associated with schools, so these data are an underestimate of the true burden of COVID-19 in schools.”

School-associated cases are defined as confirmed cases who have attended, worked in, or visited a K-12 school in-person for more than 15 minutes while symptomatic or in the 14 days before their symptom onset.

Below are the case numbers in the Park City School District in the last two weeks as of the updated report on Sep. 14:

• Park City High School — 3 cases (in the last 14 days)
• Treasure Mountain — 2 cases
• Ecker Hill Middle — 6 cases
• Jeremy Ranch Elementary — 2 cases
• Trailside Elementary — 3 cases
• Parley’s Park Elementary — 1 case
• Mcpolin Elementary — 1 case