COVID Numbers Increasing

[Unregistered]

With COVID numbers increasing everywhere, I feel it’s only a matter of time before it lands on my doorstep. Have any of you had to close for 14 days due to being in close contact with someone who tested positive or you have tested positive? Have you had any daycare families who have had to quarantine?
Are you charging families while you are closed or when they have to quarantine? Full or partial payments? I just don’t want to find myself in a cycle of not getting paid.
I am also wondering if my family members (husband and two teenagers) would need to quarantine if I need to close because a daycare child tested positive?

[Blackcat31]

So much discussion about COVID... I understand your stress for sure!

Here are several other threads about requiring payment during COVID, managing COVID in child care and both parent and provider quarantines.

https://www.daycare.com/forum/tags.php?tag=covid-19

[e.j.]

With COVID numbers increasing everywhere, I feel it’s only a matter of time before it lands on my doorstep. Have any of you had to close for 14 days due to being in close contact with someone who tested positive or you have tested positive? Have you had any daycare families who have had to quarantine?
Are you charging families while you are closed or when they have to quarantine? Full or partial payments? I just don’t want to find myself in a cycle of not getting paid.
I am also wondering if my family members (husband and two teenagers) would need to quarantine if I need to close because a daycare child tested positive?

I think a lot may depend on the state you live in. In my state, I had to close when one of my dc kids tested positive because he had been in my care during the 2 days before he first started to show symptoms. While I had to quarantine, my family members did not. I was told to try to stay as far apart from my family members as possible, wear a mask, wash my hands frequently, disinfect anything I touched, etc. As far as I know, only the parents of the child who tested positive had to quarantine. The other kids in my dc who had had close contact with the child who tested positive had to quarantine. Their parents did not have to since they didn't have direct contact with the child who tested positive. (If their owns kids subsequently had tested positive, they would have had to quarantine at that point.)

As far as payment, I've decided to stick with my normal payment policy for as long as possible. If one of the dc kids is out but the day care is still open, I charge as I normally do for any illness. If I'm the one who gets sick and has to close, I don't charge. When I had to close down totally because of that Covid exposure I mentioned above, I didn't charge parents because I was able to collect unemployment. I've told parents that I may have to revisit that policy if I run out of unemployment insurance.

[Pestle]

I'm in a hotspot, in a city with no enforced mask mandate, restaurants are open, and we're 15 minutes from two other states with laxer policies and higher infection rates. The adjacent county's infection rate is approaching 1 out of every 100 residents over just the past two weeks (they're the folks who just voted in that QAnon "My opponents are all pedophiles" representative, and they just lost one of their commissioners to COVID-19). The next county the other direction lost their mayor. My kid's school has shut down once (I was able to stay open) and her classroom has gone into isolation once (I had to close). We also had a shutdown for nearly a month this spring. We're anticipating another shutdown very soon because our rates are so high.

Our county health department handles who has to isolate on a case-by-case basis. They reach out and give instructions and then check back in to monitor. Unfortunately, because the infection rate has skyrocketed, test results are taking 500% as long to come in as they were in the early fall.

If somebody who's been breathing the air in your daycare has tested positive, it's possible you and all employees and enrollees will be required to isolate for two weeks, but family members who aren't living in the space won't be--that's how it worked with the classroom isolation period at the school.

I've been charging 1/3 tuition while shut down so we can survive. For families out sick or out in isolation, regular tuition applies, same as a kid out sick with pinkeye or the flu.

[flying_babyb]

Small center here (45 kids) in Wisconsin (one of the cities that is in the top 5 for infections)

Have any of you had to close for 14 days due to being in close contact with someone who tested positive or you have tested positive?
Yep, had a DC family test positive so we closed. A teacher tested positive 2 days later.

Have you had any daycare families who have had to quarantine? Had a couple so far. Mostly parents who were still working outside the home.

Are you charging families while you are closed or when they have to quarantine? Full or partial payments?
Our director had gotten a grant that covered our first closure. She has told the families that if she has to close again, that it will be partial payment.


I am also wondering if my family members (husband and two teenagers) would need to quarantine if I need to close because a daycare child tested positive? Yep! we were told by state we had to quarantine because one of the families got covid. It was a long two weeks