Students head back to school amid summer COVID-19 surge
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Students are going back to school in the thick of a COVID-19 surge.
After lots of quarantining during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now suggests treating COVID-19 like other respiratory sicknesses. So, when is a child too ill to go to school?
"Kids with a fever should definitely stay home. Also, severe symptoms where they're coughing a lot and likely to cough on other people should stay home," said Dr. Kristen Mertz, medical epidemiologist for the Allegheny County Health Department.
How long do kids with fevers and bad symptoms have to miss class?
"The current recommendation is to stay home with respiratory symptoms until you have no fever for 24 hours, and your symptoms are getting better. And then if you do have COVID after that, you should wear a mask for the next five days after you go back," Mertz said.
So, no matter the illness, it's OK to send a child back to the classroom with some improving symptoms if their fever has been gone for 24 hours without fever-reducing medications.
In Allegheny County, COVID-19 cases have been going up since late May. Mertz said officials are seeing about 70 hospitalizations in the county per week.
"Cases and hospitalizations and emergency room visits are all going up. Most people have some sort of immunity, either from vaccination or past infection so that we don't have such severe cases as we did in the past. But it's still here. People should know that people are still getting hospitalized. People are still dying, especially the elderly," Mertz said.
She said Pennsylvania's COVID-19 vaccination rate for the last vaccine for 2023-24 was about 25 percent.
"Fewer kids, probably more of the older adults than younger adults got the vaccine. But still nowhere near where we would like to be," said Mertz.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is set to sign off on the updated COVID-19 vaccine as soon as this week. Dr. Mertz expects the new shot to come out in September.
"We're hoping that we can get better coverage with that vaccine," she said.
She said there are several reasons why everyone 6 months and older is encouraged to roll up their sleeves.
"It should be a good match to the variants that are out there. So, it'll prevent some infections. And even if it doesn't prevent infections, it's very good at preventing hospitalizations and deaths. And in addition, it also helps to prevent long COVID," Mertz said.
