COVID-19 cases in Vanderburgh County schools revealed in new state map

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — A new online tool designed to help track COVID-19 in Indiana schools gives local residents their first glimpse at details about cases in Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. and other local schools.

The COVID-19 school dashboard offered by the Indiana State Department of Health is intended to give the number of cases in particular schools around the state and can be found at coronavirus.in.gov/. Locally, it is the first historical snapshot of COVID-19 cases among students, teachers and staff. ISDH officials say the dashboard is in its infancy and is still relatively unrefined.

Schools were not required to provide the data, although ISDH Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box has said the state would consider a mandate if schools did not cooperate.

Hovering over Vanderburgh County on the searchable map and magnifying it, it is possible to see many local private schools have reported no data. Data for schools reporting fewer than five positive cases either among students, teachers or staff is suppressed to protect privacy, and many EVSC schools fall in that category. Some report no cases at all to date.

Local high schools appear to account for the largest chunks of cases so far in the pandemic, with Reitz High School registering 21 student cases, including seven that are new. North High School reports eight student cases and Central High School seven.

More:EVSC town hall: Superintendent 'very confident' COVID-19 hasn't spread through schools

On an EVSC podcast posted Wednesday, EVSC spokesman Jason Woebkenberg gave a preview of the school case data that the corporation has been so reluctant to share with the public. Woebkenberg was speaking just hours in advance of ISDH's release of per-school COVID-19 case data.

"We’ve had several schools with no cases. We’ve had some with a minimal amount where it will be suppressed," Woebkenberg said, referring to how the ISDH won't provide the precise number of COVID-19 cases among either students, teachers or staff at a particular school if there are fewer than five in one of those groups.

"We’ve had a handful of others that have had a slightly larger number than that," he added.

ISDH guidelines call for school districts to report cases only if the infected person was on school property for a school-related function within 48 hours of symptom onset or a test that turned out positive. School districts aren't asked to report cases among virtual students if they don't participate in extracurricular activities.

More:Nearly 2,400 cases of COVID-19 reported in schools, including 250 new student cases

Statewide, the new ISDH school case dashboard shows that nearly 2,400 cases have been reported among students, teachers and other school employees — 1,676 among students, 335 among teachers and 343 other cases among staff members — since the new school year started this fall. 

In a press availability with Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb Wednesday, Box said the dashboard is still being developed as a source for school case information.

“I want to emphasize that this dashboard is still a work in progress, and we will continue to refine the data and collect more data,” the state health commissioner said.

Box said the state is still working with schools to extract data and remove duplicate records.

More:Indiana to make 'strong request' — for now — to schools for COVID-19 data

Of those that have submitted data, 617 schools have reported no cases at all. Another 742 schools have reported one or more cases. Students comprise the majority of the reported cases. The numbers include 253 new student cases reported just last week, along with 52 new teacher cases and 71 new staff cases.

Indiana serves roughly 1.1 million students in grades K-12. There is no answer yet as to how many of those are represented by the schools reporting data to this point. Box on Wednesday cited, "96.5 percent of our schools that are back with most of them being full-time in-person, but at least partly virtual."

EVSC gives info hours before state's per-school data release

Parents have been frustrated by EVSC's refusal to tell all parents in a school or the public when or if a COVID-19 case pops up. EVSC officials have said they will share news about new cases only with state and local health departments and parents of children who are "close contacts" in COVID-19 cases.

Those are the people who "need to know," Superintendent David Smith has said.

Smith and Woebkenberg have insisted their rationale is to protect students' and employees' privacy and protected health information — even though no one has asked EVSC to name students and staff who contract the virus.

Just this past Monday, Smith was still questioning why someone would want to have the information.

"What would you do differently if you received that email?" he asked rhetorically. "Are you going to change your actions because of that? If the answer is yes, then I would respond back, 'Then you probably are not being as vigilant as you should be on an ongoing basis.'"

But in a podcast posted on EVSC's Facebook page Wednesday, Smith and Woebkenberg opened up a little more in advance of ISDH's then-looming release of per-school COVID-19 case data.

More:EVSC cites privacy rights on COVID-19 data, but no one is seeking names

"To date, no one that has been in close contact with a positive in the school setting has then become positive, so that’s why we can say with confidence that we don’t think there is any spread or transmission within the school setting," Smith said.

The superintendent asserted that only one-half of 1% of EVSC's total population of students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19. With 22,000 people in EVSC schools each day — roughly 19,000 of whom are students — that would come out to roughly 110 persons.

Smith was not including the roughly 3,400 students in the EVSC Virtual Academy in his calculation.

In Vanderburgh County as a whole, Smith said, the percentage of residents who have tested positive is 2%. The number who have tested positive— 3,906, according to the ISDH dashboard on Wednesday — is in fact slightly more than 2 percent of Vanderburgh County's population of about 181,000.

“When you do that math, that gives us some indication that, to date, we are not seeing the kind of spread within the schools or within the school population that Vanderburgh County proper has seen," Smith said.

Vanderburgh County turns orange

ISDH offers a color-coded map of Indiana's counties rating the level of spread in each from minimal to high. The map, which updates each Wednesday, is based on the number of cases and positivity rate in a county during the previous week. Counties are assigned a color that corresponds to their spread level: blue, yellow, orange or red.

Schools in counties coded orange can consider operating grade schools in person but the state makes a strong recommendation for hybrid learning for middle and high school students.

More:Teachers say EVSC leaving them in the dark about COVID-19

On Wednesday, Vanderburgh County joined Warrick, Spencer and Brown counties as the only ones in the state to be coded orange.

Smith acknowledged that EVSC middle and high schools aren't switching from in-person instruction to hybrid learning — in effect bucking the state's recommendation for orange counties.

"We don’t feel that we need to do that yet, but I just want to implore the public: Please be ready if that happens," he said. "If the number of cases continues to go up in Vanderburgh County, then one would also assume that they go up as they enter our schools.

“With that then would come with some other consequences, frankly."

There is no guarantee EVSC can continue with in-person instruction, Smith said, as COVID-19 has not been contained.

“I’d love to be able to continue to have spectators at our sporting events and other activities, but that’s not a guarantee, and frankly, it’s not a guarantee to continue to have sports and other extracurricular activites as it’s not a guarantee that we’re going to be able to stay in school," he said.

“At this point in time, we’re OK. I’m just putting out there that we have to make certain that we are at the peak of cases for COVID-19 and we need to see a decline.”

The math of tracking school-age cases matters too

There is other math that can be brought to bear in understanding the local spread of COVID-19 among school-age children, but its implications for the spread of cases within EVSC can only be inferred.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic's first five-and-a-half months, an estimated 314 school-age children in Vanderburgh County tested positive. Some 256 more have been added just in the past five weeks, since EVSC — the county's largest school system —reopened to its entire student body.

The data can be gleaned from ISDH's dashboard, which reported Wednesday that 14.6% of the 3,906 COVID-19 cases that have been reported in Vanderburgh County represent individuals in the school-age demographic of children age 0-19. That works out to slightly more than 570 cases.

More:EVSC: Teachers misunderstand COVID-19 policy, don't have to be anonymous

On Aug. 28 — one day after EVSC's first day with its entire 2020-21 student body welcomed back into classrooms together — children age 0-19 accounted for 12.6% of positive cases in Vanderburgh County. On that day, Vanderburgh County reported that it had accumulated 2,495 positive cases since the first one emerged on March 19.

And 12.6% of 2,495 is slightly more than 314.

The difference between 314 and 570 — 256 cases — is one indicator of how many cases may be in local schools.

Vanderburgh County does have private schools, but EVSC is the largest local school system by far with some 23,000 students if you include those who are in the corporation's Virtual Academy. EVSC officials have acknowledged a large percentage of Vanderburgh County's school-age population attends its schools.

But that's not the whole picture, either.

The University of Evansville and the University of Southern Indiana have dashboards that track COVID-19 cases, although neither specifies how many of the students are 18 or 19.

On May 21 — when Vanderburgh County had just 228 COVID-19 cases in all — just 3% involved individuals 19 or younger.

The statewide figure for the 0-19 age group Wednesday was 13.1%.