New York City reports remarkably low COVID-19 positivity rate at open schools: mayor
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday said that testing across the city’s public schools have shown “remarkable” results, highlighting a 0.17 percent positivity rate across all open schools.
After more than 16,000 test results have come back from hundreds of schools, only 28 students and staff have tested positive in the entire school system, he said.
The city has a mandatory testing program which tests once a month in every school. The tests were administered between Oct. 9 through Oct. 16 in 377 schools.
“As we have started that testing program we have just seen remarkable results,” he said. “This is really extraordinary,” the mayor said, adding this really “bodes well for the future of our schools and our ability to fight and overcome this disease.”
The 28 positives included 20 staff members and eight students, out of the results of 16,298 tests randomly collected by the New York City school system in the first week of its COVID-19 testing regimen, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
When officials put mobile testing units at schools near Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods that have had new outbreaks, only four positive cases turned up — out of more than 3,300 tests conducted since the last week of September, said the paper.
“The sprawling system of public schools, the nation’s largest, is an unexpected bright spot as the city tries to recover from a pandemic that has killed more than 20,000 people and severely weakened its economy,” the paper added.
“If students can continue to return to class, and parents have more confidence that they can go back to work, that could provide a boost to New York City’s halting recovery,” according to the paper.
In September, New York became the first big urban district to reopen schools for in-person learning. Roughly half of the city’s students have opted for hybrid learning, where they are in the building some days, but not others. The approach has enabled the city to keep class sizes small and create more space between desks.
“The absence of early outbreaks, if it holds, suggests that the city’s efforts for its 1.1 million public school students could serve as an influential model for school districts across the nation,” the paper added.
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Source: Xinhua