ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Schools across New York have reported at least 1,200 students, teachers and staff have tested positive for the coronavirus since the start of the academic year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday, though that number is almost certainly an undercount.
As of Tuesday, 693 public and private schools had at least one infection since classes started resuming in early September, according to state health data. Over 700 students and 400 school staff have tested positive for the virus.
Some of those students and teachers were in classrooms where they would have had contact with other members of their school community. Others tested positive while learning remotely.
State officials noted the count doesn’t capture the full extent of infections among either schoolchildren or teachers.
A separate, more comprehensive data collection system operated by state health officials that pulls test results straight from laboratories documented just under 2,300 infections among children aged 5 to 17 across the state between Sept. 1 and Tuesday, according to data released to The Associated Press.
That’s more than triple the number of infections among school-aged children that schools have reported, a discrepancy due partly to the data covering a longer time period. New York City’s schools, for example, didn’t reopen, even for remote learning, until the middle of the month and there was no standard system for parents there to report illnesses to school officials until the past few days, when people began returning to in-person learning.
The state is publicizing both sets of numbers on its online COVID-19 Report Card for school districts.
“It will not always match up perfectly, because sometimes when the school district reports and when the lab reports there might be a slight lag, but the goal here really is to give parents and New Yorkers full transparency,” said Gareth Rhodes, an aide to Cuomo, last week.
New York has about 4,400 public schools and 351 charter schools serving 2.6 million students. Several hundred thousand more attend private schools.
“You really have a lot of different entities reporting on something that changes every single day, probably every hour,” said Kevin Casey, president of The School Administrators Association of New York State. “Trying to get consistency given that backdrop is really challenging.”
After beating back the infection in the spring and seeing relatively low transmission rates all summer, the number of new infections in New York has been on the rise in recent weeks.
Over the past 7 days it has averaged more than 1,000 new cases per day, a level of spread that hadn’t been seen since the first week in June.
“I think there’s very recent increasing concern that after a long period of flat numbers, they’re starting to creep up,” Casey said.
The state’s 64 colleges and universities have reported 1,999 cases among students and employees. A handful have reported clusters of hundreds of students: SUNY Oneonta switched to 100% remote learning for this fall semester after being inundated with nearly 400 COVID-19 cases.
New York on Thursday joined at least ten other states that have launched phone apps that can alert users if they have been within 6 feet of another app user who has tested positive for COVID-19.
Cuomo said the COVID Alert NY app, which relies on Google and Apple technology, doesn’t retain any location or personal data.
The success of the app will depend on sign-ups, and Cuomo urged New Yorkers with smartphones to download it for free from app stores.
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