School Coronavirus Tests Yield Just 28 Cases, De Blasio Says

NEW YORK CITY — A tiny handful of coronavirus cases emerged in random tests conducted across the city’s schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

Just 28 positive cases were found out of more than 16,000 tests conducted across 377 schools, de Blasio said Tuesday.

For those who haven’t calculated a percentage since high school, that’s a positive rate of 0.17 percent.

The city’s average stood at 2.52 percent as of Tuesday.

“This testing is working and it’s helping keep our schools safe,” de Blasio said.

The results echo encouraging signs from the random tests — which began Oct. 9 and sample between 10 and 20 percent of a school’s population. So far, it appears New York’s unprecedented school reopening hasn’t led to a spike in cases.

But it also appears many parents and students don’t share de Blasio’s rosy-tinted optimism.
Students continue to opt into remote learning plans — in fact, those students now outnumber in-person or blended learning pupils.

The random tests are also only conducted on students whose parents filled out a consent form. Roughly 20 percent of parents have so far filled out the forms, officials said.

De Blasio said parents have “steadily” filled out the form. He said so far enough tests have come in to be useful for officials.

“We have to keep getting back more and more consent forms, no doubt,” he said. “But I think we're on the right trajectory. Down the line, if we have a problem, we'll address that, then we've been very clear about how that would be addressed, but that's not a problem right now.”

Parents can fill out the form at mystudent.nyc. Staff can fill it out at healthscreening.schools.nyc.