MADISON, Wis.– Weeks away from the start of a new school year, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction is out with a list of new guidelines they hope all schools will follow to keep students safe. The majority of the recommendations are common sense: keeping kids home when sick, encouraging them to wash their hands and cover their coughs, etc. But there are a couple changes local doctors believe, when implemented together, will make a big difference.
The CDC recently added the recommendation that fully-vaccinated people who have been exposed to someone with COVID should get tested 3-5 days after exposure and wear a mask in public, indoor settings for 14 days, or until they receive a negative test result.
The latest guidelines from DPI recommend schools follow that, meaning fully-vaccinated students who’ve been exposed to COVID can still attend school while awaiting their test results, as long as they’re masked. If the students’ tests comes back positive, they would then need to isolate.
The updated recommendations also double down on masks, saying all students and staff should wear them, vaccinated or not.
“One, we know they’re safe,” said Dr. Sabrina Butteris, Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs for UW Health’s Dept. of Pediatrics. “Two, we know they’re extremely effective.”
“Researchers across the country studied all kinds of schools and they looked at kids who were wearing masks the correct way,” she added. “They found masking was so protective, that kids in quarantine, when they were exposed to someone else who was masked, very few of them went on to develop COVID.”
Butteris says every major medical association has consistently recommended masks, even before the Delta variant.
There is a change, however, when it comes to social distancing. According to the new recommendations, three feet of space is now okay, again, as long as students are masked.
“If masks were not consistently on our faces, we would really need to leverage our distance,” Butteris explained. “But with them, we have the ability to have a more normal school year and normal classrooms.”
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