Knox County Schools

No more data

July 27, 2023: The data sources I was using for this site are no longer being updated. The only remaining sources seem to be sewage data; CDC has it https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#wastewater-surveillance but it’s all relative (Covid levels in sewage versus the highest at any point at that site, but sites came online at different times). Biobot Analytics has data on absolute numbers through time (as well as variants) https://biobot.io/data/covid-19 but they no longer have freely accessible raw data. Even hospitals release data only sporadically and incompletely now. I might poke around later to see what’s available but for now I’m not updating this site.

Old site

Knox County Schools are releasing information at https://www.knoxschools.org/covid, I take a snapshot of this every 24 hours and plot it. See also this page populated by parents and guardians of students as an unofficial project, which gives more granular data on individual schools: https://kcsdashboard.org/.

Individual Schools

Knox County Schools now have data on individual schools. We can see the percentage of students and staff in each school (those absent could be out for many different reasons, not just covid). Schools are aggregated by type: elementary, middle, high school, or other (such as Knox Adaptive Education Center or Richard Yoakley Alternative School). Note that lines do not change over school breaks.

Plotting this by individual school over time, students first:

And staff:

Family-Provided Data

Using data kindly provided by the KCS DIY COVID-19 Dashboard from reports by families directly, we can see how long students have gone from having symptoms to getting a positive test result:

We can also see which grades have the most student reports from this family-provided data. However, this only comes from 119 student cases, while far more than 816 students have gotten covid in 2021-2022 school year in Knox County Schools (this is a major underestimate: the school system only releases the number of active cases, not new cases, so the number above is the most in any one day with covid). The DIY dashboard dataset has much more detail – Knox County Schools is giving no indication of cases by grade, for example. To report your student’s own case to the DIY dashboard, go to https://kcsdashboard.org/reports/create and fill out the form.

County-Provided vs State-Provided Data

We can also compare Knox County Schools to what the state has for students age 5-17 who live in Knox County (who include the students enrolled in the public schools, but also those who go to private schools, who go out of the district, etc.). The state data includes new cases, while Knox County Schools only includes active cases, which depending on definition can be all of those who have been 10 days or 14 days since the onset of symptoms and who have a positive test result.