28,000 school-age children test positive for COVID-19 in two weeks

More than 28,000 school-age children in Tennessee have tested positive for COVID-19 over the last two weeks, the Commercial Appeal reports.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Education plans to relaunch its pandemic dashboard after Labor Day.

Chalkbeat has reported the data included in the dashboard was incomplete because of limited reporting by school districts and privacy concerns. Here’s what the publication said about the portal in November:

A Chalkbeat analysis of COVID-19 data in the state’s schools dashboard shows between 880 and 3,540 student coronavirus cases weren’t included in the district level totals from Oct. 19 to Nov. 15. Similarly, at least 685 and as many as 2,740 teacher cases also were excluded on the district level.

The wide range in the number of excluded cases in districts is caused because of how Tennessee shares data when there are fewer than five cases in a school. In Chalkbeat’s analysis, the lowest case estimates (listed above) presume there is one case in a school while the highest calculations presume there are four cases in the school.

The state “suppresses,” or excludes, data when there are fewer than five cases at a school. Data is shielded in small data counts because releasing that information could inadvertently lead to students or teachers being identified.

So if a school reports two COVID cases, for example, the state’s dashboard displays it simply as less than five cases for that school, but those same cases are excluded from the district totals in the dashboard. That means your school might report fewer than five cases, but the district level numbers would show zero.