New York City Public Schools Alter Quarantine Rules, Stockpile Testing Kits For January Reopening

New York City’s public schools are bracing themselves ahead of a new semester by stockpiling testing kits and reworking their policies to protect students against the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

On Tuesday, New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul joined Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor-elect Eric Adams to detail how public schools are preparing ahead of the next semester’s start on Jan. 3. De Blasio, who is in his final week in office, referred to the emerging policy as "Stay Safe and Stay Open" in a nod to the twin goals of preventing school closures and ensuring students are as safe as possible.

During the last week of the previous semester, several city schools closed down because of infections among students or staff. Under existing city policy, a single infection can result in the shutdown of an entire school as a precaution against COVID-19.

This policy has been controversial, but now New York officials are looking to curtail these quarantine rules to keep schools open as long as possible. Adams, who will replace De Blasio on Jan. 1, has declared that he is not in favor of further school closures.

“Your children are safer in school, the numbers speak for themselves,” Adams said at the press conference.

As part of the state’s bid to harden public schools’ defenses against the virus, the New York public school system will receive one million testing kits in the coming days. Hochul said that the kits are expected to be delivered by the end of this week for New York City schools.

“They can be in hand for the school districts to be able to deploy them the way they choose,” said Hochul.

New York City’s public school system is the largest in the U.S. with just over one million students attending its 1,500 schools.

The nation's most populated city has already seen an uptick in Omicron cases and the state recently registered a new daily record as of Monday with 49,708 cases.