COVID-19 reporting

One gaping hole in the plan is the county’s reliance on the self-reporting of COVID-19 cases, because it needs honesty from infected individuals. A COVID-positive student who meets someone without permission, for instance, may conceal the interaction and hinder contact tracing to avoid repercussions at home.

“I have little faith in the students,” Nikmorad said. “I see kids are having parties, and they’re not going to [tell] the truth…how they got COVID…because they’ll get in trouble.”

Online gossip and bullying is probably not going to help. Students who feel marginalized or out of place in school might avoid reporting for fear of bullying through these types of online channels. FCPS has been warning students about peer pressure and bullying for years, but when it comes to actually taking those things into consideration, the district seems to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Aside from the obvious downsides, self-reporting has also given rise to more devious means of concealing infections.

“Having parents, students and personnel self-report is deeply problematic,” Caponetti said. “And we can see that playing out in lots of other school systems, where parents are making pacts to not disclose COVID positivity because they don’t want schools shuttered.”

But in fairness, the county has few other options. From an economic standpoint, the other methods used to track infections are not ideal because they waste resources or are inefficient.

“In terms of being able to quickly recognize what’s happening in our buildings, I don’t see any other way, unfortunately,” Springfield school board representative Laura Jane Cohen said. “Because the delay in hearing from the [Fairfax County] Health Department is just too long…it’s kind of like any social contract; I can’t keep you from [reporting COVID cases] but my expectation can be that you do, so that your behavior doesn’t impact my ability to do what I want to do.”

Nevertheless, economically sound choices are not necessarily good for society. FCPS should not be pushing to get so many students into school buildings, especially overcrowded ones like McLean, if there is no reliable way to track infections.

Transparency is a key issue the county needs to take seriously. The school district’s case reporting article linked prominently on its homepage places the Virginia Department of Health’s website at the top. At a first glance, the choice seems logical, given that the state’s health department is the most reliable source for information. However, it fails to disclose the shortcomings of the department’s data and misleads visitors into thinking that cases are lower than they are.

In addition, schools with coronavirus cases were limited in capacity when they were open months ago. The district never informed residents of the percentage of people with coronavirus per school, which made reopening schools seem safer than it was. 10 cases in a school with a 2,000 student capacity may not have seemed like much, but it becomes more concerning when there were only 200 people in the building at the time.

Unreliable reporting could badly hamper FCPS’s ability to control the virus, something numerous people are already skeptical of. Yet the district charges on without any real acknowledgement of future outcomes; the county is treating serious public health concerns as a “let’s cross that bridge when we get to it” situation, which is highly inappropriate given the current circumstances.

“I am really demoralized to think it’s going to take the first death of faculty or a student to get people to put a pause on this experiment,” Caponetti said. “And at that point, it’s an irreparable loss…because [coronavirus infections] are a domino effect.”