Whether you’re sitting in class or roaming the halls I’m sure you’ve picked up on the fact that your peers are coming and going within your classes due to being quarantined. Now you may be thinking “How do they know who’s been exposed to this virus” or “How do they know who hasn’t been exposed”. Well, the simple answer is because of contact tracing. Although you may have never heard that phrase before, contract tracing is the method used to determine who has been exposed by a person that was diagnosed with COVID-19. Farmington High School’s nurse Tiffany Roth states “Contact tracing here at the school isn’t much different than anywhere else. The basis is to determine who all could potentially have been exposed to a positive case, educate them on the situation, and what they should do to keep themselves and those around them healthy”. Here are more in-depth steps given by Farmington High school’s nurse Tiffany Roth.
1. The nurse is notified of a positive Covid case. This is usually done by a parent or a student.
2. The nurse notifies the administrators of the new case and then calls the parent of the student to discuss the details including symptoms, when they started, if anyone else in the home is sick and if the positive person can isolate themselves from any other family members in the home.
3. We gather a list of contacts the positive person has been within 6 feet of for 15 minutes or more within the last 2 days before their symptoms started. These are considered “close contacts.” If these students are currently at school they are sent home after talking to their parents and complete understanding has been verbalized. We also gather the seating charts for each class the positive student was in for the 2 days prior to symptom onset and determine who is a close contact within their classes. Those students are also sent home to quarantine.

Now you may be asking yourself why you would have to quarantine even if you don’t have the virus, well so we can slow the spread of this disease and go about our daily lives as best as we can.