Avoided sending the whole classroom into quarantine
Monday, January 18, was the first regular school day after the Christmas holidays at Sonans Trondheim. This was also the day when the school would use NOA's infection tracking service for the first time.
On Thursday evening, the principal of Sonans Trondheim, Arne Pukstad Juliussen, received a message from the local infection control office: One of their students had tested positive for Covid-19, and they had to react quickly.
- We were at risk of having to quarantine everyone in the classroom after one of our students was found to be infected. We avoided this because of a very good infection tracking system.
Because basically everyone in the classroom had to be quarantined immediately.
- "We quickly submitted the necessary information, and the same evening we received feedback that only one of the 12 people present in the classroom had to be quarantined. This was due to a very good system for tracing infection," says the principal.
This is the first time that infection has been detected in students at Sonans Trondheim, and the student who was infected belonged to a class with a total of 22 students, 11 of whom were physically present in the classroom. The rest followed the teaching via Teams.
The classroom where the lesson took place originally accommodated 50 students, and the student who was quarantined had been sitting 2.1 meters away from the one who had been diagnosed with Covid-19.
- Fortunately, we had already started using NOA's infection tracking service. When we were called, it took no more than two hours before we had full control of the situation, all necessary information was reported to the infection control team and all staff were informed," says the headmaster.
- Without a secure infection tracking system, everyone in the classroom would have to be quarantined immediately. "It will be very important for us to use NOA's infection tracking service in the future to be able to conduct physical education in a safe and secure way," Juliussen adds.
With these experiences in mind, Juliussen has some advice for others looking for a similar system:
- A prerequisite is a good class map from the start, where all classrooms and desks are numbered. These are the same numbers that are registered in NOA's infection tracking service, and the students themselves check in to their own space. We spent a couple of hours printing and placing all the QR codes before the first day of school, but you only need to do this once. It allows us to quickly report who sat where and when, if an infection situation arises, as it did with us.
- If you put this effort in at the beginning, NOA's infection tracking service is a good system for a long time to come. This is an incredibly vulnerable situation for all of us, and the most important thing is that we do everything in a safe, simple and secure way.
Do you need a safe and efficient infection tracking system on your campus?