The Chair of the board for the Kamloops-Thompson School District says COVID-19 reporting will look quite a bit different this year compared to last.

The change is led by Interior Health and will see notices go out in the case of outbreaks, but exposure notices would only go to those who need it. Rhonda Kershaw says it is more in line with what we would typically see in a public health scenario.

“So what we’ll see this year is it will be very specific to those people that need to act and we won’t have those school wide notifications that go out. We also won’t be reporting number of cases to our general population or to our board meetings.”

“So unless there was an outbreak declared, so where they found there was significant in school transmission, or that they needed to declare publicly to be able to manage the health of a number of people they would then declare it publicly. But otherwise it will only be for those that actually need to act.”

Kershaw says part of the reason behind the change is that when reporting all exposure events it often led to anxiety in schools and it noticed that when there was a notification that attendance would drop almost immediately. “Even though there might have been a few children in a school that were actually affected. The other benefit to not having those wider community notices is that those who truly need to be contacted by public health will be.”

Kershaw says this is being led by public health not by schools or by our principals, but they would become the first point of contact in a lot of cases. “That is really not what we desire. We want this to be led by the professionals by those that can make those expert decisions.”