DHEC to Begin Providing K-12 Cases of COVID-19 by School & Clarifies CDC Information about COVID Deaths

This week, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) will begin providing twice-weekly reports on the number COVID-19 cases associated with staff and students at public and private schools in the state.

This school reporting will include for every school both cumulative and rolling 30-day counts of confirmed cases among students, teachers and faculty members, and will be updated on DHEC’s COVID-19 webpage on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. The first reports will be available this Friday, Sep. 4.

Key points about this new data include:

The reporting does not mean that students, faculty or staff contracted the virus at school. Unlike a nursing home, where residents live at the facility, students, teachers and faculty come and go from school and are active in their community and could come into contact with the virus outside of a school setting.

The reporting will include kindergarten through 12th grade students in private and public schools. At this time, college students will not be captured in these reports, although several colleges and universities are choosing to announce cases on their websites. College students residing in South Carolina are included in South Carolina’s daily numbers, reported out by county based on current address.

Only those individuals who physically attend school on a regular basis will be included in the counts. Sports coaches, tutors, part-time employees, kitchen staff, custodial and maintenance workers and other school employees with a physical presence in schools will be included in these reports. Those students who participate in virtual instruction but are on campus regularly for extracurricular activities will also be included. 

Some schools may choose to self-announce cases before they are reflected in DHEC’s twice-weekly reports. There may be in a delay in what cases are included in DHEC’s online reporting, as the agency works to receive the information, review it and confirm it before presenting it online

To view the school cases lists, which will first be available this Friday, visit scdhec.gov/COVID19schools.

 

DHEC Clarifies Recent CDC Information about COVID Deaths

Earlier this week (DHEC) issued a statement clarifying what it identified as a misunderstanding around newly released data from the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention Control (CDC) regarding deaths associated with COVID-19.

In a press release, DHEC explained that provisional death data updated by the CDC last week shows that for six percent of COVID-19 deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause of death mentioned. The remaining 94 percent of deaths were among people with other underlying or contributing conditions but COVID-19 was still a factor in the deaths.”

The press release further explained that cause of death, as listed on a death certificate, includes an immediate cause, intermediate causes, underlying cause, and contributing conditions. A common example of cause of death involving COVID-19 would have acute respiratory distress syndrome as the immediate cause of death, which is the ultimate condition that caused the death. The intermediate cause of death would have been pneumonia, with COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death. The underlying cause of death is the condition that leads, via intermediate causes, to the immediate cause of death.

Contributing factors could have been asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, or any other illness or condition that may have made the condition that was the cause of death worse than it would have been.

For example, a death certificate may list Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome, Pneumonia and Covid-19 as causes of death. COVID-19, as an underlying cause of death, is the condition that triggered the cascade of events that eventually lead to death. The press release explained that while certain people such as older adults are more likely to have more contributing factors, if the person doesn’t contract COVID-19, then those factors don’t start the cascade of events that lead to death. Therefore, the DHEC release explained, while COVID-19 infection had a significant role in causing the death in the example, it was not the only cause of death listed. As a result, that death would not count in the six percent from the CDC.

This is not new information, the DHEC release emphasized, explaining that it’s been understood for quite some time that individuals with certain underlying conditions are at greater risk for severe illness and death, which is why DHEC provides underlying health conditions data, also called comorbidity information, for COVID-19-associated deaths on its county-level dashboard, under the “Deaths” data section. 

Learn more about conditions that increase the risk of severe illness on the CDC website here. This updated data from the CDC further emphasizes the risk for people with these underlying health conditions.

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