NORTHAMPTON — The School Committee is seeking infectious disease experts, epidemiologists and other interested parties with strong health backgrounds to join its new ad hoc COVID-19 advisory committee, which held its first meeting on Monday.
One of the body’s key tasks is to review the School Committee’s proposed masking policy for the upcoming school year and make a recommendation. The policy advanced last Thursday calls for universal masking when required by law or when community spread is deemed high by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rather than the current standard of medium community spread.
On Wednesday, the CDC considered the level to be low.
“We’re hoping they’ll be a place for advising us about what we should do in schools to mitigate COVID,” School Committee Vice Chair Gwen Agna said of the new ad hoc committee. “We’re hoping that the experts there can weigh in, as well as the Superintendent’s Health Advisory Committee.”
Known as SHAC, the committee advises interim Superintendent Jannell Pearson-Campbell on strategies for battling the pandemic. SHAC is also preparing a recommendation about the draft masking policy.
At an Aug. 18 special School Committee meeting, Pearson-Campbell noted that school starts on Sept. 1 and suggested putting a policy in place by then, keeping in mind that it could be amended if necessary. SHAC’s next meeting will be held Sept. 7, but it is not a public meeting under the state’s Open Meeting Law.
On the other hand, the ad hoc committee is a public body that is subject to the meeting law; those interested in joining can contact the office of Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra.
Agna said the ideal committee membership would represent a broad array of expertise on the subject. The superintendent currently has the power to impose and lift mask mandates unilaterally under certain conditions, pending the soonest possible meeting of the School Committee.
Pearson-Campbell and two School Committee members — Michael Stein of Ward 4 and Kaia Goleman of Ward 7 — sit on the ad hoc committee with Northampton Public Schools nurse Lisa Safron, an epidemiologist, a pediatrician and a person “with a strong public health background,” Agna said, adding, “I don’t know that they’ve established any kind of cap” on membership.
In the seven days prior to Aug. 18, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported 8,224 new cases of COVID-19 in the state, bringing the total during the pandemic to 1.83 million. On Aug. 16, the latest date for which hospital data are available, there were 176 patients statewide hospitalized primarily for COVID-19 and 64 patients were in intensive care units.
More than 20,000 people across Massachusetts have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic, according to the state health department.
Safron gave a presentation to the School Committee last week about the district’s current mitigation efforts, in keeping with the state education department’s back-to-school standards, and said that masking remains optional in nearly every part of all school buildings.
“There is required masking in all health offices, and that follows the (state health department) guidance for health care facilities,” Safron explained. “The Commonwealth is not recommending universal mask requirements or surveillance testing of asymptomatic individuals, contract tracing or test-to-stay testing in schools.”
The district plans to continue offering symptomatic testing, even though it is not a state requirement, and a separate area of each health office is set aside for students who need to be separated after receiving a positive in-school antigen test result.
District nurses will continue data tracking efforts that were in place last year and education programs around respiratory etiquette and hand washing are ongoing.
Safron said 90% of students in Grades 6-12 have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, along with 80% of students in Grades K-5.
Under the state guidance, asymptomatic people should not be excluded from school based on exposure or vaccination status, but they should mask for 10 days and test on Day 6. Children and staff who test positive must isolate for at least five days.
Safron’s detailed presentation also described the conditions for leaving isolation and the timing of testing under various circumstances, and offered a reminder of common COVID-19 symptoms including fever, difficulty breathing, loss of taste or smell, and a cough with no other known cause.
On Monday, Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Merridith O’Leary issued a statement on the city website in which she wrote that the city has signed on for wastewater monitoring of COVID-19 through Biobot Analytics, reiterated the scientific support for vaccination and provided an update on best practices according to federal, state and local health officials.
“COVID-19 wastewater monitoring is a powerful complement to diagnostic testing and has become a scientifically sound predictor of new spikes of COVID cases in local jurisdictions,” O’Leary wrote. “Wastewater monitoring has been used at multiple geographic and population scales, from measuring community-level disease activity using wastewater treatment plant samples, down to measuring sewage in individual buildings, such as university dormitories, correctional facilities, and places of work.”
Northampton’s participation in the program will begin “in the very near future,” she wrote. The information will be available on the city’s online COVID-19 dashboard.
The department is planning free weekly vaccine clinics for the fall. O’Leary wrote that the clinics will offer hours “to make sure any of the youngest children can finish their series of vaccination and will likely continue to include boosters, including the bivalent booster,” which targets omicron subvariants in addition to the original strain of the novel coronavirus.
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.