On Tuesday January 25, the Virginia Department of Health announced that it is no longer conducting contact tracing in most circumstances, stating that “Omicron is now the most common COVID-19 variant and is spreading so quickly, it is not possible or fruitful to track every case.” The Virginia Department of Health is now focusing its efforts on responding to COVID-19 clusters and outbreaks in high-risk settings, as well as promoting disease prevention and mitigation strategies.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, our school division has monitored school level and community data. Over the past two weeks, we have observed a decrease in our number of reported positive COVID-19 student and staff cases in school. Effective Monday February 14, we will make the following adjustments to our COVID-19 procedures:
School health teams will no longer be performing contact tracing to identify school-based close contacts.
While positive COVID-19 case counts will continue to be updated weekly on our COVID-19 dashboard, principals will no longer send daily notifications of positive cases in their schools. Principals will continue to provide notifications of any school-based outbreaks, if outbreaks occur.
Students and staff who are identified as close contacts from a positive case in their homes or in the community will still need to quarantine.