State public health officials announced their public health guidance Thursday for the 2022-2023 K-12 school year with no mask or vaccine requirement for students or staff.
The guidance, which officially went into effect Friday, includes recommendations that students get vaccinated against COVID-19 and wear a mask indoors but does not require that they do either.
California students will not be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine until at least July 1, 2023, provided that the vaccine is fully approved by federal regulators for all age groups.
The guidance also requires that students cannot be prevented from wearing a mask as a condition for participating in a school event or activity.
Teachers and school staff are also not required to wear a mask, but the state has required them since August 2021 to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or test weekly for the virus.
“COVID-19 is here to stay, but we have learned methods and gained tools to decrease its impact on our health and well-being,” the CDPH said in a statement on the guidelines. “California’s schools can manage this disease in sustainable and adaptive manners.”
Rapid antigen tests should be considered the primary testing option for schools over PCR tests, according to the CDPH. Students and staff are also advised to test for the virus before returning from summer, winter and spring breaks.
Schools will be required to provide paid COVID sick leave through at least Sept. 30, 2022. Students who test positive are also advised to stay home from school for at least five days and wear a mask around others for at least 10 days.
Oh, look! Just in time for the election!
Dan Reynolds is not going to be happy when he hears about this.
Wow, are you sure? You mean the true villains (CA teachers) don’t want to go for broke?
This is all for show until the election. Then refer back to part that says “California students will not be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine until at least July 1, 2023, provided that the vaccine is fully approved by federal regulators for all age groups.”
Then look at what Senator Richard Pan (check out who his major donors are btw) & Weiner and friends want to do. Once it is approved they want to make it so there are *no* exemptions for the C19 vaccine in K-12 schools (for public and private schools)
Many families will pull their kids out of the school if it is mandated with no exemptions. While some of you may think that is fine, it will create a snowball effect for everyone. The major decline in registration will cause all sorts of financial issues on top of an already current dire situation for schools districts.
To go this past school year and this upcoming school year without a mandate and then have it be mandated for the next year makes zero sense. Our kids have already suffered enough as it is.
Liberal logic strikes again. Covid is over (never was a threat, really) and to reserve vaccination mandate for the ’23 school year is beyond idiotic. What part of doesn’t prevent contraction nor transmission don’t the communist overloads understand???
I’ve never in all my years witnessed such nonsensical madness.
@Deb Shay – You have forgotten that hospitals were overflowing to the point that people critical ill with COVID-19 were turned away in the hope that they would recover on their own. Hospital ICU units were overflowing into temporary areas such as parking garages. At times, bodies were piling up faster in some areas than coronor’s offices and funeral homes could process them.
Something that’s less clear to me is if the current variants are less deadly or if the virus picked off and killed most of the low hanging fruit in the population which were mainly medically at risk people who also continued to work or socialize with others. In two years the virus killed over a million people in the USA and 6.3 million worldwide.
Wrong. Hospitals were never overflowing, thats pure hype, and the majority of those in the hospital either had comorbidities, or were there for other medical reasons. With covid, not from covid. Huge difference, but one that was ignored in the stats.
I knew covid was a hoax when 1. Lord Fauci said riots were not super spreader events, but attending church, or a funeral, or a wedding meant killing grandma,
And 2. Masks were recommended for outside activities despite studies proving that false.
Covid was a means to a politcal end, one that, thankfully, has begun unraveling.
In related news, the positivity rate continues to climb with 15% of the population, or an estimated 165,000 people in Contra Costa County, currently having an active case of COVID-19.
The good news is that of the 165,000 current cases only 87 (0.05% or one out of every 1900 cases) of them are hospitalized for COVID-19. Eight of those 87 patients have severe enough cases that they are in the ICU. The county delays reporting deaths for several weeks and so it’s harder to compare that to the other numbers which get updated daily. 25 deaths were reported for May (20 from the community and 5 from long term care facilities) and 14 have been reported so far for June (13 community and 1 LTCF).
The bad news is that it appears that politicians and health authorities in the USA have given up on the fight against COVID-19. It’s here to stay until attitudes change. If you are at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 then your lifestyle from here on out is shelter in place and wearing a mask during your limited mixing with others.
So how many of these cases that were overloading hospitals were school-age children?
“If you are at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 then your lifestyle from here on out is shelter in place and wearing a mask during your limited mixing with others.”
If the vaccine prevents severe illness as they claim then why would someone have to shelter in place at this point? What did immunocompromised individuals do year after year during the flu season prior to Covid? People need to start living their lives and stop living in fear.
@Popeye – The teachers, staff, and parents/families are more at risk than the children. Of the 1347 deaths in CC county only two of them were for people under age 18. The virus spreads among the children without harming them. They in turn infect adults who are more likely to have severe cases.
The county has never reported demographics on the hospitalizations, and has never reported hospital admissions other that back when they had the LTCF dashboard. The LTCF page had the number of LTCF related hospital admissions. The county has always reported on the number in the hospital. It’s 91 today. If 10 people are admitted and another 10 are discharged the county will still report it as 91. The public has never been provided with an accurate way of measuring if and how mild or dangerous the virus is.
The vaccines lower the chances of severe illness. None of them prevent it. That’s why I said “your lifestyle from here on out is shelter in place and wearing a mask during your limited mixing with others” At present, your chances of getting hospitalized are 6.2 per 100,000 people for the unvaccinated, 1.9 for the fully vaccinated, and 2.1 for the fully boosted. While that makes it look like getting boosted means it’s more likely you will end up in the hospital than plain old vaccinated keep in mind that the people getting booster shots are the ones in the highest risk groups. If the vaccine prevented severe illness then the numbers would be zero. Instead, getting vaccinated means you are a third less likely to be hospitalized than someone who is not vaccinated.
WC Resident has been staying at Holiday Inn Express again.