New Georgia COVID rules loosen school quarantine, tracing requirements

Georgia teachers won’t always have to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 and schools don’t have to trace every exposure to the disease under new directives from the state.

A letter from Gov. Brian Kemp and Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey on Thursday said the relaxation of those rules, along with expanded state testing for the disease, was intended to keep schools open.

“Like you, our chief goal is to keep our kids in the classroom with minimal disruption to their education, and we will continue to support you, your faculty, your students, and your parents in carrying out this mission,” the letter said.

DPH has published two revisions to its pandemic orders since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced quarantine and isolation periods last month. Employers have struggled to maintain staffing and many feared more outages because of the recent spike in cases.

The letter elaborates on Wednesday’s state order. The order says asymptomatic teachers and staff can continue working in school after exposure to COVID-19 as long as they wear a mask for 10 days. Prior rules from last fall allowed school districts to write their own quarantine rules for exposed “individuals.” Teachers were previously included and the amended order clarifies that, a DPH spokeswoman said.

Many school districts, including Cobb County, have been allowing students to remain in classes after a school-based exposure.

Cobb Superintendent Chris Ragsdale told his school board Thursday that the new state rules will allow him to keep teachers working in person.

“So as long as they’re going to wear a mask for that quarantine period, they’ll be allowed to come back to work the very next day, which will greatly assist us in maintaining all of our classrooms being open,” he said.

Ragsdale said the testing expansion — it covers symptomatic and asymptomatic students, staff, faculty and their family members — will also help. (A DPH spokeswoman said the testing for family members is new.) And he said the relaxation of contact tracing requirements will ease the burden on staff.

“I greatly appreciate the governor’s attention to this because as we all know, contact tracing has been probably the biggest lift on staff resources,” Ragsdale said. He was echoing a longstanding complaint among school leaders about the time committed to phone calls to track down exposures.

It takes so long, Ragsdale noted, that some people who were close contacts were not informed until the period when they should have quarantined had elapsed. He said Cobb will scale back its contact tracing because of the letter.

The letter says the reporting of positive cases is still required. “However, we know that contact tracing has become more challenging as cases have increased in schools and throughout the community,” Kemp and Toomey wrote, adding that it’s a “best practice” that is now optional in schools.