Children who have a known exposure to COVID but are asymptomatic DO NOT need to be seen in our office. Per the Bulloch County BOE guidelines, it is your choice as a parent whether or not to quarantine your child. If you decide to quarantine them and they remain symptom-free, you can return them to school at any time without a doctor’s excuse.
Children who are symptomatic and are sent home from school must quarantine for 10 days. If a parent believes that their illness is not due to COVID, they can return before 10 days with a doctor’s excuse. Please note that if you call our office requesting an appointment, you will likely be referred to a testing center if your child has classic COVID symptoms. A positive test will result in your child needing to quarantine for the entire 10 days. If your child tests negative and their symptoms have resolved, we will provide an excuse for your child to return to school as long as the test was a PCR (send out) test. We are not currently providing excuses for rapid tests as they are not as sensitive as the PCR test. In addition, if your child’s COVID test is negative and they are still having symptoms, we will try to bring them into the office to determine the cause of the symptoms and then determine if they are able to return to school.
In most cases the symptoms are mild and therefore, we are asking parents to simply keep their children at home and monitor them. If they start to get worse, we do ask that you call us so that we can help you.
Please be patient with us and know that we are trying our hardest but we simply cannot see everyone. Provider offices are simply overwhelmed trying to handle all of the calls for triage advice and calls for appointments.
For information about local COVID testing by the health department, please click here.
The AAP Symptom Checker will help you determine if something needs to be seen by a doctor or if it is something that they can handle at home. Visit the symptom checker here.