photo by: Kevin Anderson/Journal-World File Photo

The Lawrence-Douglas County health department's home at the Community Health Facility, 200 Maine St., is pictured in this file photo from July 2010.

With Lawrence students set to return to classrooms following summer vacation, officials with Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health say it’s difficult to tell yet just how much that might lead to an increase in local coronavirus numbers.

“I am very curious about what the start of school will bring for our COVID numbers, especially with the (University of Kansas) students being back,” Sonia Jordan, the health department’s director of informatics, told the Journal-World Wednesday.

Her curiosity should soon be satisfied. The school year for the Lawrence district begins on Thursday, and the first day of classes for KU’s fall semester is Monday. Entering the semester, both the school district and the university have information on their websites detailing their internal COVID-19 prevention measures. KU also signaled where it thought the virus was heading as its COVID-19 command team disbanded at the end of June.

Regarding the university, Jordan said the larger population on campus — plus the fact that many students are traveling to Lawrence from out of state or from abroad — means there’s an increased risk for transmission.

As for the younger school-aged population, Jordan said it could go either way; it’s entirely possible that with classrooms of 20-plus students in a concentrated place, clusters of positive cases could pop up. Vaccination rates for that age group paint a positive picture of what the next few weeks might look like, at least. Health department data from mid-July shows that 57.3% of the county’s population between ages 5 and 11 had received at least one vaccine dose. Older age groups have even higher vaccination rates: 74% of those age 12 to 15 and 84.6% of those age 16 or 17.

That doesn’t necessarily eliminate the worry that in-person schooling will lead to the outsized spread of the virus, Jordan said, but it does lessen the concern of how manageable it will be if it does begin to spread more widely again.

“At least what reassures me as a parent is that I’ve taken the steps with my family and my children to ensure that even if they do get COVID, I have some reassurance as a parent that they will be able to navigate it successfully health-wise and socially, like knowing how to stay out of school and not expose other people accidentally,” Jordan said. “… I don’t think it fully eliminates the concern, but I think it does make it feel more easily navigable. It feels less scary to navigate, at least for me in my experience, and I think maybe some other families are feeling that a little bit, too.”

•••

The return to classrooms coincides with a recent change to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which was announced late last week.

According to the CDC, the new guidance is intended to help the country move to a point where COVID-19 “no longer severely disrupts our daily lives.” That includes removing the recommendation to quarantine if you’ve been exposed to COVID-19; the CDC instead recommends wearing a mask for 10 days and taking a test on the fifth day after the exposure.

There’s still a recommendation to stay home and isolate from others for at least five days after showing symptoms or testing positive for COVID-19, though. The new guidance does add some nuance for those who have a weakened immune system or have had moderate to severe symptoms due to a previous case of COVID-19, instead recommending they isolate for 10 days.

The health department is aligning with CDC recommendations, Jordan said, and the expectation is that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment plans to as well. Jordan said the health department also won’t ask individuals to wait for a negative COVID test to leave isolation, which she said had been a requirement earlier in the pandemic.

But Jordan said the health department would still recommend testing to be sure, if only out of an abundance of caution.

“I think doing the test to leave isolation is just a sound, best practice,” Jordan said. “I think it’s going to give you that peace of mind that you’re not infectious, that you’re not going to accidentally get somebody ill, that you’re not going to accidentally expose Grandma or Grandpa to COVID. I still think that is something people should consider doing when they’re thinking about leaving isolation.”

Jordan said she thought the latest recommendations were the CDC’s attempt to recognize that COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere; it’ll likely integrate into the virus circulation that takes place seasonally each fall and winter, she said, along with other illnesses like the common cold and influenza.

“We need to kind of start aligning how we interact with it to allow people to do things like work more successfully, go to school more successfully, those kinds of things that really impact a person’s day-to-day life and well-being,” Jordan said. “And health, actually. School is really important for kids and their health.”

Jordan said there’s also reason to believe that, though imperfect, there’s a wider range of natural immunity to the virus now compared with earlier in the pandemic. In part, that’s because of the increased availability of vaccinations and their effect on the severity of symptoms, but also because unvaccinated people who have already contracted COVID-19 may have a better immune response if they contract it a second time.

In a nutshell, Jordan said the CDC is signaling that we’ve arrived at a point where individuals can generally be counted on to practice good mitigation habits on their own terms.

“We know what works,” Jordan said. “We know masks are effective, we know things like social distancing and strong ventilation can really help stop transmission. So with these things all combined, the shift has occurred more to the individual business’s responsibility, or the individual person making sure they’re doing the right thing — if they’re sick, they’re testing, and if it’s a positive test, they’re staying home.”