With our combined goal of keeping students in the building, please continue your diligence in evaluating symptoms before leaving home using the home screening tool and attendance guide from MDH. If your child has only one of the “less common symptoms” from the MDH decision tree, consider keeping them home to monitor how that symptom progresses through the day.
Two key points:
- If your child stays home due to symptoms, siblings need to be home if your ill child’s symptoms meet the decision tree criteria.
- If anyone in the home is being tested due to symptoms, all children must stay home until you have test results.
Close Contact and Testing Clarification
If one member of the family has been identified as a close contact and you choose to test everyone in the family, only the close contact will need to quarantine. Here is MDH’s response to the question of testing family members of the close contact:
Students and staff who are not symptomatic, not living in a household with a symptomatic individual, and not a close contact of a confirmed COVID-19 case, do not need to stay home from school if they choose to seek a COVID test. The student/staff could still come to school while waiting for results as they themselves were not the close contact.