Maine schools are now responsible for nearly 70 percent of the state’s active COVID-19 outbreaks, which is another sign of how the virus is spreading more actively among younger people as adults are vaccinated.
But that does not mean that the virus is spreading profusely within schools, where strict masking and social distance and other arrangements to reduce contact with students have kept the transmission in check. On the contrary, the outbreaks are more a reflection of students contracting the virus outside of school, according to school officials and an expert who followed up on COVID-19 cases in schools nationwide.
Public and private K-12 schools in Maine are the sites of 52 of 75 active outbreaks listed by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention this week. But school-related affairs represent only ten percent of the state’s total affairs over the past month. Only one school recorded an outbreak with more than 20 cases.
Most COVID-19 cases nationwide in children do not come from the distribution of the classroom, said Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, who followed up school cases through the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard.
Children are more likely to contract the virus from family members or, less frequently, from out-of-school activities such as sports, Oster said. This was apparently applicable even though COVID-19 was present in communities during the early winter peak in Maine and the USA.
“Children are generally less likely to be infected than adults,” Oster said. A warning is that since all adults are vaccinated, we are likely to see relatively higher rates in children. ‘
In Lewiston’s public schools, 32 students have tested positive since April 1, nearly a third of all cases in the school department since 2021, Superintendent Jake Langlais said. He believes the rise is linked to several factors: warmer weather, the recent Easter holidays and COVID-19 fatigue after a year of restrictions.
“People are tired of these rules,” Langlais said. “I think there is a feeling of impatience.”
As the number of cases increases, Langlais works to convince parents that it is important to check for symptoms and not to send their children to sick school. While schools often reflect the communities where they are located, the restrictions that are there are the only things that can stop things from soaring, Langlais said.
“I do not think we had evidence of what you call a community in our schools,” Langlais said. “But I also think that if we did not take the right measures we did, we would absolutely have the problem. . ‘
The increase in school-related cases may be a reflection of the vaccine explosion. Although all Maine adults can now be vaccinated, most of the K-12 student population are not. The only students eligible are those who are 16 and older, and those under 18 can receive only one of the two authorized vaccines – the Pfizer vaccine, which is more widely available in the larger population centers of the state than in rural areas. areas.
So far, 16 percent of Mainers ages 16-19 have received their first shot after being eligible on April 7, according to Maine CDC data. While some colleges, including Bowdoin College in Brunswick, will begin demanding that students be vaccinated before they arrive on campus in the fall, there is no such requirement for K-12 schools.
Administrators said they were not sure how many of their students had received the vaccine, and that they were not locating it. Kathy Harris-Smedberg, the interim school superintendent in Bangor, said it remains to be seen what restrictions the city’s schools will have next fall. Her team is preparing for a number of options, depending on the appearance of the virus, she said.
“Ideally, I would say I would like all students to have school five days a week,” Harris-Smedberg said. But according to her, it may be necessary to keep COVID-19 restrictions, including masking and social distance, in place. Bangor students were able to go to school in person five days a week this school year, with occasional interruptions when students, staff and bus drivers were infected with COVID-19.
Bangor High School is currently the site of an active outbreak, with five cases, according to the Maine CDC.
The middle and high schools in Bangor Christian Schools were home to the largest school outbreak in Maine, with 27 COVID-19 cases reported in the past month, according to Maine CDC data.
Principal Martha Boone said the CDC in Maine did not provide specific information about the cause of the outbreak, but she said it appears most of the transfer came from interaction between Bangor Christian students outside the school.
Students learned about a week at a distance due to the outbreak, but are now back to personal classes. In many ways, the distance learning session was less difficult due to the outbreak than the sudden switch to online learning in March 2020, Boone said. The recent shift had an end date.
While Boone said teaching at Bangor Christian Schools during COVID-19 was largely unchanged, staff needed to provide more emotional and spiritual support to a student body experiencing a complex and uncertain pandemic.
“Often the school is the only continuously safe place that many children have,” Boone said.
BDN author Caitlin Andrews contributed to this report.