As many school districts return to classrooms for the fall term this week, COVID-19 infection rates in 19 California counties — including Contra Costa and San Francisco in the Bay Area — are so high they would have kept schools from reopening under state pandemic safety rules last spring.
When the state retired those rules at the end of the last school year in June, cases rates were falling after a brutal winter wave of infections. But the now-dominant delta variant of the virus, which health officials say spreads two or three times faster than the virus circulating in the spring, has since driven cases up sharply.
A Bay Area News Group analysis of county health department case rates shows all but three of California’s 58 counties would now be in the most restrictive “purple tier” under the state’s retired reopening blueprint. And some of the largest — Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego — have rates that would have been too high to open schools last spring.
Will elementary schools — whose pupils are too young to be vaccinated — be able to avoid outbreaks as more than 6 million public school students return to classrooms?
The California Department of Public Health said it “will continue to assess conditions on an ongoing basis” but noted its guidance, which requires face masks for all students and staff indoors, aligns with that of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“The state has a number of tools, including testing and vaccination resources, at the ready to support local public health responses to significant outbreaks,” the department said in a statement Monday.
Superintendents such as John Malloy of San Ramon Valley Unified School District, Contra Costa County’s largest with 32,000 students, are confident the health measures in place will keep the kids safe as they return to school Tuesday.
“We’ve got you!” Malloy said in a “welcome back” video message to school families. “As we prepare to open our schools this August we know how important this is. We haven’t all been together for a very long time. And so we’re going to do everything we can to make sure you feel safe and you feel that sense of connection and for those of you who are studying virtually in our academy we’re going to take care of you as well. All of our staff are ready to go.”
District spokesman Terry Koehne said school administrators can only trust in the safety guidance put forth by state and local health authorities. The mask requirement has been controversial statewide and is being challenged in court by two parent groups who argue it is needless and harmful to children already traumatized enough by the pandemic. Nine other states have similar mask requirements.
“We’re going about this as best we can,” Koehne said. “We are going to do everything we can to make sure our students are safe coming back to school.”
The state’s spring rules allowed schools to reopen if their 7-day average daily case rate was under 25 per 100,000 people. As of Monday, the county rate was 29.1 in Contra Costa, 27.9 in San Francisco, 19.6 in Alameda, 14.8 in San Mateo and 11.6 in Santa Clara. The rate was 28.5 in Sacramento, 28.1 in San Diego and 25.1 in Los Angeles.
The fall return to class is quite a contrast to the spring. California, which suffered the nation’s worst outbreaks over the winter, was also among the slowest states to return kids to classrooms, even part of the week, for in-person instruction, despite studies and evidence at the time that said it could be done safely.
With kids suffering isolation and learning loss from more than a year of mostly remote online “distance learning,” many parents demanded schools reopen classrooms and harnessed their anger over the state’s response to help force a recall vote in September for Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Newsom has since insisted that remote learning no longer remain an option for districts in the fall except for a limited number of families who sign up in advance for an independent study program.
But as infections skyrocket once more, some parents have been anxious about the return, even wishing remote learning — bad as it was — would remain an option. At San Ramon Valley Unified, 600 kids are in the independent study program, and Koehne said it has a waiting list. And two of the first districts to open in the Bay Area in the Contra Costa County city of Brentwood reported multiple cases among students and teachers in their first week.
Other parents, however, say they fear more school closures more than COVID-19 or even its fearsome delta variant. Megan Bacigalupi, executive director of OpenSchoolsCA, whose two kids in the Oakland Unified School District returned to class for the first day of the fall term Monday, doesn’t want to see them suffer through another round of remote learning.
“We have known children are at low risk of bad outcomes from COVID, and the same is still true with the delta variant,” Bacigalupi said. “If the last year and a half has taught us anything, it’s that the risks to children’s mental and physical well-being is far greater keeping them out of school.”
Case rates, she said, must be taken in the context of high vaccination rates and low hospitalization rates. In California, 62.9% of those 12 and older eligible for the shots have been vaccinated, a rate that compares well with other large states.
The vaccinated, even if infected, are much less likely to suffer severe illness resulting in hospitalization and death. Nationally, even though infections among kids have risen over the summer, COVID-19 hospitalization and fatality rates among children remain exceptionally low.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California-San Francisco who has studied COVID-19 outbreaks in schools, said the safety measures developed over the course of the last year worked even in places with high rates of community transmission of the virus, as demonstrated in large U.S.-based school studies. Measures such as masks and ventilation still work against the delta variant, she said.
“And that was before teacher vaccination,” Gandhi added. “We are in a better position than we were.”
