APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – It’s that time of year again where many students are staying home sick from school.
Several school districts are seeing quite a few absences due to RSV, COVID-19 and influenza.
“Although COVID-19 is not spread very well on contact or surfaces, influenza can spread that way and RSV can spread that way even more efficiently,” says ThedaCare Family Medicine Doctor Zach Baeseman.
Many area districts have been struggling with this.
The Gillett School District had to close last Friday because too many students and teachers were out sick.
“If you have just a couple kids in the classroom, and you have substitute teachers because all your teachers are sick, at some point it makes sense to shut things down for a couple of days,” says Baeseman.
The Neenah School District typically sees 92.94% of students attending class, but on Monday it was 87.30%. The Oshkosh Area School District had 913 students recorded as absent due to illness on Monday — nearly 300 more than a week before when 645 students were absent.
Daycares have also been affected.
“We’ve had a lot of kids out with croup and RSV, at least half of our center has had either of the two, and we have about 60 kids there,” says Assistant Teacher Chatterbox Daycare in Kiel Cheyanne Kujawski.
Kujawski says they have had to increase cleaning at the daycare.
Parents of young kids are worried about how much school they are missing.
Appleton Area School District Parent Kaitlin Pohl’s son has missed 14 days from being sick.
“After 10 days, they sent me a letter. Then I actually got a second letter telling me that they would like me to fill out a health form or have my doctor fill one out for him, but he only saw the doctor one time,” says Pohl.
Pohl says she feels frustrated because she doesn’t want her sick kid in school but also does not want her son to be truant.
“I don’t think that keeping our kids home for two years helped this situation because I’ve never seen illness like this before. All of these kids are so sick,” says Pohl.
“I think what we are seeing here with all of those respiratory bugs being active certainly in part can be explained by the drastic measures that we did have to do at points in the pandemic,” says Baeseman.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is sending out a reminder for people to get their flu shots.
