St. Charles East High School on state’s latest COVID-19 outbreak list

KANE COUNTY – Kane County now has 10 schools on the Illinois Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 school outbreak list, which was updated Oct. 15.

That’s up from eight schools the week before. IDPH updates the school outbreak list every Friday. As of Oct. 15, IDPH now considers a school outbreak as “multiple cases comprising at least 10% of students, teachers, or staff within a core group or at least three cases within a specified core group. A core group means only those individuals who were together during an exposure period.”

New on the Oct. 15 list was St. Charles East High School. According to IDPH, St. Charles East has fewer than five cases among students with sports as the source of exposure.

Rotolo Middle School in Batavia had six cases among students, with the classroom as the source of exposure; Ferson Creek Elementary School in St. Charles had nine cases among students, with the classroom as a source of exposure; West Aurora had fewer than five cases among staff and students, with sports as the source of exposure; and South Elgin High School had fewer than five cases among students, with the classroom as the source of exposure. All of them first appeared on the list last week, Oct. 8.

Kaneland Harter Middle School remains the Oct. 15 list, after it first appeared on Sept. 24, with fewer than five cases among students with the classroom as the source of exposure.

Grace McWayne Elementary School in Batavia remains on this week’s report and has fewer than five cases among students, with a classroom as the source of exposure. It first appeared on the list on Sept. 17.

Also on the Oct. 15 list are Kenyon Woods Middle School in South Elgin with fewer than five cases among students; Creekside Elementary School in Elgin, with fewer than five cases among students; and Garfield Elementary School in Elgin, with fewer than five cases among staff and students.

According to the IDPH, the school outbreak data “includes entries elicited from cases opened within the previous 30 days from date of update.” The IDPH on Oct. 15 just updated the definition of a school outbreak to

Schools are considered to have an outbreak if they report two or more COVID-19 cases who “may have shared exposure on school grounds and are from different households.”

As of Oct. 15, 53.31% of youth ages 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated. There were 196 new cases among children 17 and under between Oct. 3 and Oct. 9, the latest week available, which is considered “decreasing or stable” from the previous week, according to IDPH.