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Ohio State creates COVID tracking system for schools
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: November 23, 2020
When a central Ohio kindergartner visits the school nurse with a sore throat and a second-grader at another area elementary school in the district goes home after a bad cough sets in, those details are entered into a special COVID-19 system developed at Ohio State.
The COVID-19 Analytics and Targeted Surveillance System, or CATS, was devised to track possible signs of COVID-19 infection "such as school absences and nurse visits for COVID-like symptoms" for school district staff and local public health officials alike.
CATS can serve as an early warning system for case clusters, said Ayaz Hyder, the Ohio State University public health professor who spearheaded the project.
“Over the summer, I learned there was no strategy to help school districts make decisions about what to do how to switch between different learning modalities,” said Hyder, an assistant professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences.
He contacted Hilliard City Schools, where three of his children are enrolled, and proposed a pilot project using the COVID-19 monitoring methods he’s developed for agencies throughout the state.
Hilliard agreed, and Franklin County Public Health was brought on board to provide expertise in contact tracing, outbreak investigation and data interpretation, a press release detailed.
“They were getting pressure from parents to use local data, because county-level trends don’t always represent what’s happening in the individual community,” Hyder said. “We were able to provide that data, which has helped them make key decisions.”
Rapid interest in CATS from other schools led to a contract from the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio to implement the system in districts throughout the region, said Anne Trinh, senior program manager at the College of Public Health’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Evaluation Studies.
Upper Arlington, Dublin, Grandview Heights, Westerville, New Albany, Whitehall, Worthington, Bexley and Groveport Madison school districts have also started using CATS, Trinh said. Other districts await deployment of the system.
Funded through the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, the new system has the potential to become a foundational infrastructure for the foreseeable future Educational Service Center Superintendent Tom Goodney said.
He noted it how it could aid educators in decision-making and communicating with community stakeholders.
“Anne and Dr. Hyder have become a welcome voice in our calls as we review state, regional, county and local data relating to the pandemic,” Goodney said.
Hyder lauded the work of undergraduate and graduate student workers, saying development of the systems would have been possible without them.
“They are working day and night on making these things behind the scenes happen,” he said. “They’ve really learned how to build the plane while also trying to fly it.”
Pranav Padmanabhan, a junior research assistant in Hyder’s lab, said he has gained invaluable skills working with CATS.
“Working on this project has taught me how to think ahead and anticipate certain questions or needs from decision-makers and attempt to address them pre-emptively,” Padmanabhan said. “Something may seem intuitive, but a useful intervention in the real world must be simple enough to communicate to others while also considering the most important factors from many perspectives.”
Trinh noted the project’s unique academic-educational-public partnership.
“We’ve been able to bring the school districts and public health together in a way that they haven’t worked with each other before. Public health typically gets involved when there is a confirmed case or an outbreak, but with our CATS system they’re getting involved before that happens,” she said.
CATS is made possible with resources at the Ohio Supercomputing Center, the press release provided.
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