What you should know
- The Omicron variant is increasing rates of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, especially among vaccinated people. Hospital admissions for New York City children have increased fivefold in the past three weeks, officials said.
- The variant’s combined threats, its link to higher but milder progressive infection rates, holidays, and lagging vaccination rates among young children are raising new concerns in schools.
- Historically, New York City schools have been one of the lowest transmission points for COVID. Will that hold after the holidays? According to the latest data, there are 1,383 confirmed cases, 65% of them among students.
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Growing concerns were addressed at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s press conference Tuesday morning, joined by State Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor-elect Eric Adams. related to actions to be taken when students return to schools.
The mayor said that starting January 3, Back to School Day, PCR testing for COVID-19 will double in all schools each week. Additionally, tests will be conducted on both vaccinated and unvaccinated students, and teachers and school personnel will also receive the tests.
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Those are some of the immediate changes to better protect students and employees in schools amid a surge in COVID-19 cases. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the Big Apple also plans to rely more on home testing.
“Schools have been safe. Schools are where children need to be,” the mayor said emphatically. “The science is clear. Schools must be open to address the physical health, mental health, nutritional health and academic needs of students.”
Still too low vaccination rates among elementary and middle school children in the nation’s largest public school district, combined with a demand for COVID-19 testing, fuel concerns.
Could New York City schools, long hailed as one of the safest places for children during this pandemic due to low transmission rates in class, be forced to add a remote learning option to start the new Year? Right now, that’s not the plan.
But as Governor Hochul said a day ago, that could be “subject to change in the future” depending on Ómicron and other trends. It was the first time he had made his way, even minimally, on the subject of schooling in person since his inauguration in August.
What has changed? Ómicron, officials say. New York City schools were among the first in the country to implement vaccination mandates for Department of Education staff, 96% of whose employees are vaccinated as of Tuesday, de Blasio said.
But evidence of vaccine evasion from Omicron has reinvigorated concerns about spread rates even in communities where they have been exceptionally low.
According to the most recent data, there are 1,383 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 in New York City schools, 65% of them among students. Since the schools reopened in person in September, students have accounted for 71% of the 26,274 confirmed infections.
Sixty-four public school classrooms were closed on December 27, the students’ last day before the holidays was December 23, while 1,011 classrooms entered a partial quarantine. No schools were completely closed due to the outbreaks.
Although the new variant is associated with milder symptoms than delta, those milder outcomes are highly dependent on vaccination and boosters. Since then, New York City has increased COVID-19 hospitalizations among children fivefold in the past three weeks. Statewide, pediatric hospitalizations have doubled in the same time period.
According to the state, none of the children in the 5 to 11-year-old age group who had to be hospitalized with COVID-19 this month were vaccinated. That compares with about a quarter of older children hospitalized in December, according to state officials.
Both rates are significantly lower than vaccination rates statewide, 16.6% for those ages 5 to 11; 64.2% for those from 12 to 17 years old. An even smaller proportion of the group of younger children who meet the immunization requirements in New York City are fully vaccinated (15.7%), although it is attributed to emerging vaccination sites from city schools that help drive rates. higher (70.8%) for children aged 12 to 17 years.
Gov. Hochul, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor-elect Eric Adams have urged parents to take advantage of the holidays to get their children the fix if they haven’t already. To pick up the pace, New York City added children ages 5 to 11 to its indoor vaccination mandate, but they only have to show proof of one dose of vaccine. The mandate was toughened Monday to require the two doses for everyone 12 and older.
Officials hope those adjustments, along with increased testing capacity in schools, will help mitigate recent viral spikes. New York City schools already test children from first grade on a random weekly basis, although the number of children who take the test in any given week is only a fraction of the student population.
It is not clear if the number of tests in schools will increase in the coming weeks, but the capacity is expected to be there. Schools have previously been assigned up to 3.5 million COVID-19 tests that were due to reach New York State, 2 million of them to New York City. Schools will decide whether to test children on the spot or send the kits home with them.
Schools are one of the few places where masks remain a universal requirement, regardless of vaccination status. That at least looks like it will remain the norm going forward, as will other improved school biosecurity protocols like deep cleaning, weekly testing, physical distancing, and outdoor learning as appropriate.
Ómicron has fueled unprecedented daily infections in the US and New York, breaking its own single-day record at least eight times in the past 11 days.
The variant, whose first locally confirmed case on December 2, accounted for more than two-thirds of the gene-sequenced New York COVID-19 positive samples uploaded to GISAID, the world’s largest repository of COVID-19 sequences, during the last two weeks. That’s an increase of 62.4% in the last day, and 11.1% in the two-week period Dec. 5-18, state data shows.
CDC data for the past two weeks says that Ómicron could account for 70% to 97% of current infections in the New York area during the week ending December 25. Nationally, the prevalence is estimated to be as high as 74%, the agency says.
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