COVID cases up to almost 100 in Miami-Dade schools. Broward, Keys see rising cases too
As Miami-Dade public school students and faculty embark on their third week back to face-to-face learning, the number of children and staff members who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus neared 100 Tuesday, the district said.
School cases in Broward County and the Florida Keys continue to rise as well.
According to the online dashboard where Miami-Dade Schools tallies confirmed positive cases, 54 staff members and 36 students had tested positive for COVID-19 as of Tuesday.
There are likely many more cases than are showing up on the ledger, though, because the district must confirm all test results of those who have self-reported with the Florida Department of Health before adding them to the list, officials say.
Although the district has been updating the dashboard daily, parents should not consider what’s on there an up-to-date count, but rather “a lagging indicator” that is “not intended for use as an immediate notification system of cases,” said Natalia Zea, the district’s director of communications.
School officials, however, are notifying parents in schools with positive cases with robocalls and reaching out to parents of children who may have come into contact with those who tested positive for the virus, Zea said.
Questions over student quarantines
Students and staff who’ve been deemed to have been in close proximity to people who’ve tested positive are told to quarantine. Those students return to online learning while in quarantine.
Some parents have complained, however, that siblings of those who’ve possibly been exposed to positive cases are not mandated to quarantine. Zea said the district handles the situation on a case-by-case basis.
“If the student quarantining at home is not exhibiting symptoms, the sibling, who did not have close contact with the original student, would not expect to quarantine,” she said.
About half of Miami-Dade’s 345,000 public school students have chosen to return to their brick-and-mortar classrooms. The rest are learning online as they have since last March when the pandemic shutdowns began.
Broward Schools has 72 COVID cases
The Broward County dashboard also showed increased cases Tuesday, but that database is updated only twice a week — Tuesdays and Fridays.
On Friday, the district reported 61 cases. That increased to 72 cases Tuesday — 47 staff members and 25 students. Fewer students in Broward opted to go back to in-person learning than in Dade, about 20 to 25% of the more than 260,000 students in the system.
Monroe County, which has much fewer COVID cases among its residents, also saw an increase in schools cases this week. Keys students went back to face-to-face class Sept. 14, almost a month before Miami-Dade and Broward, the last two districts in the state to return to in-person learning.
The Keys has 17 COVID cases in the schools
Since then, the official Monroe count is 14 students and three staff members, including one teacher.
With a population of about 75,000 people, there have been 2,080 confirmed cases and 25 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, much fewer than in Miami-Dade and Broward, which remain COVID hot spots.
But, cases have risen in the past week in numbers that have county and state health officials alarmed as the archipelago heads into its tourist season. Over the weekend, Monroe added 27 cases and one death to its tally. There have been 201 cases in the past 14 days, raising the positivity rate to 7 percent.
Bob Eadie, the Monroe County administrator of the Florida Department of Health, said Monday that most of the recent cases were among young people who work in the service industry and “a couple of teachers.”
Monroe, like the other districts, does not add cases to its dashboard until they’re confirmed by the Health Department, said district spokeswoman Becky Herrin.
On Monday, the district reported its highest daily number of student cases — five — since it began keeping track. Herrin reiterated that that number does not mean the district has five active cases.
Student enrollment in the Keys is 8,686 students, down from 8,949 before the pandemic. Emergencies like hurricanes — and pandemics — impact the Keys, which is a tourism-dependent economy, more than other areas.
Of the remaining students, 360 have opted to continue virtual learning, Herrin said.
Eadie said many of the new cases in Monroe can be traced back to large gatherings and other “clusters.”
During an online conference call with county officials, he said he doesn’t envision the need for another lockdown, but he urged officials to hammer home the importance of continuing to social distance, wear masks and wash hands.
“We are a long way from being back to where you would say is completely normal,” Eadie said.
