Dear All,
We have now had an additional case (1x Adult in Sunshine) confirmed.
The possible exposure day is limited to Monday 19/10 and all directly exposed children (15) and staff (4) have been excluded until Monday 02/11. Enough regular room staff happened to not be in on Monday to mean that we are able to continue operating the room as normal next week.
The trend appears to be clear that confirmed cases amongst children are rare, with 5 of the 7 total cases being among adults. Both cases in children were in older, preschool children who exhibited very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Even suspected cases are highly disruptive to families and centre operation, with the vast majority of required exclusions for symptomatic individuals proving to be false alarms. This means that the recent delays in obtaining test results is keeping both staff and children off for much longer than necessary. We have spoken to our MP and joined a growing call for priority testing for all levels of education. Faster testing wouldn’t avoid contact group exclusions when a case is confirmed, but it would reduce the amount of time suspected cases need to spend off awaiting results - allowing more consistent attendance for children and helping us have enough staff active to keep the rooms open.
I therefore also need to reiterate the request for families to keep unwell children away from nursery whenever possible - if just to avoid large number of others needing to test and isolate if they then catch and become symptomatic with something that isn’t Coronavirus. Staffing is now precarious enough that adults catching colds from attending children could close rooms to everyone for days or even weeks at a time.
Hopefully the recent surge will abate over the half-term. I will continue to post updates about all developments.
Kind Regards,
James.