Rhode Island daycare centers have not been significant centers of COVID-19 transmission since they reopened in June, state health officials say, offering it as a positive sign that young children can return to classrooms safely this fall.

The state Department of Health has linked 35 to 40 COVID-19 cases with licensed daycare facilities since June, with roughly half of those cases involving children and half daycare staff.

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And in those cases, spread within the daycare facility itself appears minimal. The cases have been spread between 26 different facilities, according to figures from Health Department spokesman Joseph Wendelken, with the majority being individual cases with infection believed to come from outside the facility.

“While there have been cases among children and staff, we are not seeing evidence of a lot of transmission happening in facilities,” Wendelken wrote in an email. “As you can see by the numbers, many facilities only have one case associated with them. Our team here attributes that to keeping children in stable groups, and the other infection prevention measures that facilities have been taking.”

There are 882 licensed daycares in Rhode Island with capacity for around 21,000 children, although only 726 of the facilities are open.

The state has been reporting about 100 new COVID-19 cases per day from all infection sources for the last few weeks.

Gov. Gina Raimondo has called for schools in communities with low infection rates to open for in-person classes Sept. 14, but parents, teachers and administrators are grappling with how safe gathering young people in large numbers indoors really is.

Last Tuesday, the Warwick School Committee voted to return to school remotely with the possibility of in-person school for special-education and kindergarten students.

Many districts are looking at returning all elementary grades to in-person classes, with middle school and high school students spending some of the week learning remotely.

“This is a reminder that COVID-19 is a preventable disease,” Wendelken wrote when asked what the daycare experience means for school reopening. “When a facility takes a thoughtful, comprehensive approach to prevention, the chances of us seeing new cases at that site are very substantially minimized. Many of the steps taken by childcare centers are the same steps that schools will be using to keep children, teachers and staff safe. That means screening people for symptoms, doing regular environmental cleaning, and keeping people in stable groups, among other measures.”

— panderson@providencejournal.com

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