Leaked documents from Fraser Health today: Covid 19 School Cluster and Transmission Analysis May 7, 2021.
We have reviewed the document and have compiled the most interesting points below along with our observations. If you don’t wish to read our observations feel free to skip to the document attached.
***This document ONLY covers the period of January 1st to March 7th, 2021 and ONLY Fraser Health K-12 Public and Independent Schools***
The leaking of this document highlights the inaccuracy of Dr. Bonnie Henry's statement at today's briefing that they do not collect transmission data for schools.
Cases were reviewed by a team of epidemiologists, analysts and Medical Health Officers for the period.
Page 6: Despite having a definition of Outbreaks in this document they stipulate that 'Outbreaks' are only declared at the discretion of the Medical Health Officers.
Page 10: Note that the peak in school cases are prior to school closures for holidays and Spring Break and the cases then fall back in line with the general community cases over the break. This contradicts the narrative that the community cases go up when kids are out of school.
Page 11: 97 Cluster/outbreak locations are identified in Fraser Health between Jan 1 and March 7. Five were reported to the BC School Covid Tracker despite the fact that our data usually includes more cases than officially announced, not fewer. Roughly 92 were never publically acknowledged or reported by Fraser Health.
Page 12: Given students age and tendency to present with mild or no symptoms they should be expected to have significantly lower detected incidence but instead they are very similar.
Page 13: 81% of confirmed clusters/outbreaks in Fraser Health were in public schools. There were 116 total clusters/outbreaks in Fraser Health between January 1 and March 7.
Page 14: A typical cluster infected 2 people but ranged from 2 - 19 people. 2/3 of clusters started with transmission from a student. This is contrary to Horgan's quote on November 18th, 2020, "Children are not transmitters of covid. Adults working within the K to 12 system are bringing the virus into the classrooms and bring it into the schools and that’s led to outbreaks in pockets of British Columbia." (https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/12/20/australian-epidemiologist-horgan-comments-kids-covid/?fbclid=IwAR1AbpXUk7C-wDNeavgxX6yGDJbcl96wl9kdOb0Sah1gK8UK6iXrruu_NxQ)
Page 19: Of cases where people attended school sick, they aquired the virus at school about 13% of the time. Of those aquisitions the virus was pass on in the community or to family about 1/3 of the time.
Page 21: Nearly 100% of Fraser Health Authority letters are being forwarded to the BC School Covid Tracker. Thank you! Also, 333 suspect cases, not included in the numbers, were unable to rule out in-school aquisition. (Note: on page 26 the document indicates that the current results reflect possible/likely in-school acquisition for these cases).
Page 25: 72.8% of clusters were attributed to introduction of COVID into schools by students. Again, this is contrary to the narrative that it is the adults bringing the virus into the schools.