Quarantine rules have changed for Philadelphia's public schools, according to Acting Health Comissioner Cheryl Bettigole. | Pixabay
Quarantine rules have changed for Philadelphia's public schools, according to Acting Health Comissioner Cheryl Bettigole. | Pixabay
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health has issued “less strict” guidance regarding in-person learning pauses and quarantines in schools, thanks to successful COVID-19 safety measures.
More than 1 million Philadelphia residents have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the City of Philadelphia.
Acting Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole announced the new guidance in a Zoom video presentation on Sept. 22. “This new guidance is less strict than our guidance before because we’ve seen that our other safety measures have been successful in containing the spread and because we’re watching and learning from containment efforts in other places,” Bettigole said in the video. “We believe that it’s possible to prevent wider spread of COVID in schools and to keep kids in school. This does not mean that there won’t be COVID in our schools.”
The new guidance, available at the City of Philadelphia website, said that close contacts of one or two people in a school who test positive for coronavirus must “quarantine for up to 10 days if they are unvaccinated.”
“If the close contacts are vaccinated, they don’t need to quarantine, but they should get tested three to five days after that exposure, so long as they don’t have any symptoms and they should make sure to mask in public,” the guidelines said. “If three people in a class test positive, that class should pause in-person learning for 10 days. If those three positive cases are in different grades or classrooms, the school should treat them like individual cases and just quarantine their close contacts.”
Schools should call the Health Department when six or more people test positive in a grade to discuss the possibility of pausing in-person learning for the entire grade.
“If three or more grades are paused, or more than 3% of the entire school community tests positive, the school should call the Health Department immediately and discuss needing to pause in-person learning for the entire school,” the guidelines said.
The City of Philadelphia website reiterates that everyone wants to see schools open and children learning in-person and that rules for quarantining are made in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19 and create a safe environment in which to learn.
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