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Updated: Most Likely To Bring COVID-19 To The Classroom? Staff Not Students
Bottom Line: While South Florida’s School Districts continue to unlawfully impose school mask mandates without parental optouts, I thought I’d revisit a story I’d received a lot of feedback on when I provided it originally. As the headline to the story suggests, we’ve started the year with a greater percentage of school district employees testing positive for COVID-19 than students. Each of South Florida’s school districts has had a far higher rate of COVID-19 infection among employees as compared to students. As part of my analysis, I took the current data available on each school district’s COVID-19 dashboards (as of September 29th) along with the current student and staff populations to produce the results. Here’s the latest:
- Broward
- 33,000 employees – 493 infections:1.5%
- 271,000students – 1853 infections: 0.7%
- Miami Dade
- 54,861 employees – 397 infections:0.7%
- 350,000students – 2,201 infections:0.6%
- Palm Beach County
- 22,426 employees – 809 infections:3.6%
- 176,724students – 5,041 infections: 2.9%
There are multiple instructive storylines here. First, we continue to see school district staff testing positive for COVID-19 at a much higher rate than students throughout all school districts. Second, while the debate and legal battles have centered on the mandating of students to wear masks, it’s the faculty which consistently are the most likely to be bringing COVID-19 to school with them. The other dynamic might have something to do with vaccination rates in each county.
Palm Beach County has the highest rate of both school district employees and students testing positive for COVID-19. That’s followed by Broward and Miami Dade. It just so happens that the COVID cases reported by school districts mirror the vaccination rates in each county. Dade, with the fewest infections has the highest vaccination rate with 91% of the county’s vaccine eligible population having been vaccinated. In Broward, the vaccination rate is 80% among the eligible and in Palm Beach County the vax rate stands at 74%. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that vaccination rates correspond with the rates of COVID-19 detected in each county’s school district, but it’s most plausible that there’s something to it. Using the information available in this analysis, the school districts would probably be better served by focusing on the vaccination rates of their faculty (which has been a priority) as opposed to the mandatory masking of students.