Excerpts:
All students in Alberta who call out sick with any respiratory illness will be counted as COVID-19 cases when schools decide whether to move lessons online.
Schools are told to contact Alberta Health Services if more than 10 per cent of the student and staff population is absent with a respiratory illness, CBC reports.
Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw said on Thursday that it is necessary for schools to assume anyone at home with respiratory illness is a positive case of COVID-19 because obtaining data on positive transmissions from pubic health agencies would violate the privacy of students and staff.
She claimed that the measure provides extra protection to students because some students who are out sick may not want to get tested for Covid.
Hinshaw told a press conference said: 'Our current framework that does not require mandatory quarantine, does not require close contact tracing, means that the disclosure of individually identifying health information as would happen if individual health notifications happened in schools would be a violation of an individual's privacy.'
'We do have a framework where schools if they see that there are an increased number of children that are ill with respiratory illness, or teachers or staff, they can work with Alberta Health Services.
'In some ways that is adding an additional layer of protection because if individuals choose not to get tested for COVID-19 but are home with an illness they are now counted in the list as being part of that outbreak, and so it's less dependent on needing a test to be part of identifying where there is an issue,'