Lang
4/13/21
The Iowa City Community School District is relaxing its COVID-19 restrictions to match guidelines already set by the state.
That decision came from the Iowa City school board Tuesday night by a 6-1 vote. Only board member Charlie Eastham voted to keep the old, stricter guidelines the district had been following since last October. That’s when the board voted to follow more strict guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, declining to follow more lenient guidelines set by the Iowa Department of Public Health. Those guidelines say it is not necessary for those exposed with an infected person to quarantine for 14 days as long as both individuals were masked during the exposure. The old rules the district had been following required the exposed person to be vaccinated in order to avoid the two-week quarantine. That is now no longer the case.
Both sets of guidelines define “close contact” as being within six feet of someone for at least 15 minutes, but the CDC guidelines also include any two people who have been in the same room for at least two hours, regardless of distance.
The guidelines set by the state also allow for various exemptions that would allow for a reduction in the two-week quarantine period, including a negative coronavirus test.
The move to the more relaxed rules comes as the district tries to get more students out of quarantine and into classrooms. There were 983 Iowa City students in quarantine as of Tuesday morning. The newly-approved Iowa Department of Public Health guidelines will be enforced retroactively to start getting students back inside schools as soon as possible.
The district will monitor its COVID data and revisit the decision in a few weeks.