Students who contracted virus were not on the campuses; GDOE to revive COVID dashboard

The Guam Department of Education has not been reporting any COVID-19 cases since the start of this school year although it has been receiving reports of COVID-positive children from parents.

However, GDOE superintendent Jon Fernandez said the children reported as COVID-positive have never been to GDOE school campuses which is why the department is finding it difficult to finalize and release its COVID-19 daily count and dashboard which has not been updated for a while.

“We’re trying to address a couple of things. Number one is throughout the shutdown, all the way through the first week of reopening, we have been getting a lot of parents continuing to report cases even if the students haven’t been on campus. And even though they come from outside the schools, we were trying to get a handle on the cases that we need to be reporting,” the GDOE superintendent said.

Fernandez said it is their intent to get back to reporting on a daily basis, just like before, and not just the cases but the really active cases.

“Part of the challenge for us has been dealing with making the adjustments. We’ve been working on trying to get something out this week including a weekly dashboard, which we are just finalizing. We were hoping to do that yesterday. But unfortunately, we’re not done yet. But we are getting back to that,” Fernandez assured.

As to when GDOE will start reporting active COVID cases again, Fernandez said they were going to start this week.

“But last week, we were still getting reports of students who were deemed positive but never made it to campus during the infectious period and may not have even been released during quarantine,” the GDOE superintendent said.

Now that the new school year has started, Fernandez said they have a better grasp of the numbers so they intend to continue the daily reporting and then the weekly dashboards, which are going to be coming out on Wednesdays.

Fernandez said they also rely on some of the Joint Information Center (JIC) information and on Mondays, the JIC does a reconciliation of what happened over the weekend.

“So we want to make sure we’re dealing with the reconciled numbers dashboard as well. And then of course the weekly reports. We also are going to be putting these out. But we will be doing this as an agency. We will provide our own reports and updates,” Fernandez said.

He added: “It is our intention before the end of the week to make sure that we do an update as well as the dashboard and then going forward, you should see a regular daily report and a weekly dashboard.”

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