Harris County School District Release: COVID-19 Weekly Report

The Harris County School District is releasing its sixth weekly COVID-19 report.

To be transparent, the data being shared for a seven-day range includes the total number of students as well as breaking the numbers down by on-campus/in-person and virtual, the total number of employees, the total number of COVID-19 active cases in each group, and the total number of close contact cases in each group.

The current data, from Tuesday, September 15 through Monday, September 21, includes:

Total number of students 5491

                On-campus/in-person students 4157

                Virtual students 1334

Number of COVID-19 active cases 0

                On-campus/in-person active cases 0

                Virtual active cases 0

Number of close contact cases 28

                On-campus/in-person close contact cases 28

                Virtual close contact cases 0

Total number of employees 735*

Number of COVID-19 active cases 1

Number of close contact cases 1

The District continues to stay in close contact with the Department of Public Health to monitor and manage the process. The District offers a COVID-19 Self-Reporting form on its website (www.harris.k12.ga.us). This form, which is monitored evenings and on weekends, provides everyone an after-hours method for alerting the District and allowing contact tracing to begin as soon as possible.

Students and their families are asked to be proactive with safety protocols including wearing masks, social distancing, good hand hygiene, and monitoring for symptoms. If a student does have symptoms, they should stay home and notify the school. If a student takes a COVID-19 test, they should stay home until they receive results and notify the school of the results.

For COVID-19, per CDC guidelines, a close contact exposure is defined as any individual who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes from 2 days (48 hours) before illness onset (or, for asymptomatic patients, 2 days prior to positive specimen collection) until the time the patient is isolated. A person exposed to a close contact exposure should monitor symptoms but there is no need to quarantine unless they begin to exhibit symptoms.