SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – COVID-19 has had an adverse impact on students of all ages who are suffering from learning loss due to the pandemic.
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With the "tripledemic" we're seeing now, knowing whether to keep a student home or allow them to attend learning in the classroom can be tricky. Dr. Naomi Bardach, a parent, pediatrician and professor at UCSF, told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed" she began studying learning loss early on in the pandemic.
"The symptoms of COVID sometimes look a lot like the symptoms of the common cold and so we knew that there were probably a lot of kids being held out just for having the common cold and not for having COVID," she said.
To avoid learning loss, Bardach wanted to understand what COVID-19 symptoms looked like to inform school administrators and policymakers what was a good reason for kids to stay out of school.
"The study that we did was actually to try and inform the policy," she explained. "We can’t give advice to families to say, 'oh if you have xyz symptom you definitely have COVID or you definitely don't,' but it helps us to understand when should they be seeking care and when might actually the public health policies need to be informed in order to make it so for very mild symptoms, like a runny nose or a sore throat, that the kid wouldn’t need to stay out of school."
Bardach and her team found that prior exposure and loss of taste or smell were all highly indicative that a child probably had COVID-19. "If you have symptoms and there was a prior exposure, then the chances of there being COVID is decent," she said.
"For people who don't have access to tests, there should be a very clear conversion with the school about whether or not they really need to be excluded for these very mild symptoms, runny nose, sore throat, which are not associated, they are not indicative of having COVID in the study that we did," Bardach advised.
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