“Now DC Health is insisting that we keep her home for another ten days.”

“Dear PoPville,

My six year old daughter just returned to school last Monday following a ten day quarantine after testing positive for covid on January 13. Then, on Friday January 28 she was included in her school’s asymptomatic testing program and her result remains positive, a fairly common occurrence. Testing kids within 90 days of prior infection is against DC health guidelines, but I’m told she “fell through the cracks” and was tested when she shouldn’t have been. Now DC Health is insisting that we keep her home for another ten days. This goes against all levels of covid guidelines, both local and federal. PCR tests can come back positive for months after infection. It’s the exact reason why DC advises against re-testing kids within 90 days after infection. And yet DC Health is treating this as if it were a new infection, which would be impossible so soon after a prior infection.

DC Health has shrugged this off as unfortunate, but the “rules are the rules” and this is “just an abundance of caution,” but no one is considering the mental health and wellbeing of my child. Telling a young child to miss another ten days of school for no reason, after two years of disrupted education, is not cautious. It is reckless. I was informed that this is happening with some regularity in the city. It must stop.

Between the extended winter break, her ten day isolation, and the coming February break, if my daughter is made to isolate again she will have had exactly two weeks of school over a two month period. In the month of January she has only had four in-person school days. It is completely unacceptable. I’ve contacted the mayor’s office, councilmembers, OSSE, my SBOE representative. How do I break through to someone who can fix this?“