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She didn’t have the heart to drag the last one, a five-year-old, kicking and screaming to get the nasal swab. “It was all so clear she just had a cold,” she said.
By now, parents are running out of paid leave themselves, said Joanna Coleman, who has had to leave work four separate times so far, with three children off school 13 days, for a variety of headaches and colds that tested negative for COVID-19.
At one point, the school sent her daughter home simply because her nose ran for 15 minutes after coming in from the cold. A single mom, she is now out of paid vacation and sick days. “I do understand the need for this,” she said. But anything that can safely streamline the process is appreciated. “We’re not going to be back to normal for a very long time.”
Data driving the change
Hinshaw said Alberta Health feels confident about making this change based on three different data sets — data showing a similar change did not significantly increase transmission in Ontario schools when it was made Oct. 1, symptom descriptions collected since the start of the pandemic after children test positive, and new data from Alberta on the children with a runny nose or sore throat who test negative for COVID-19.
On that last data set, technical challenges meant Alberta Health Services only recently started asking for a full list of symptoms from each person requesting a COVID-19 test online, Hinshaw said.
But in the last week, for example, 3,300 children under 18 said they had a runny nose when they applied for a test. Of those, 600 children had no other symptom. Two of those children then tested positive, and only one of them had no known connection to a positive COVID-19 case.
