OAKLAND, Calif. (KRON) – School has been open for a week and there has already been an outbreak of COVID-19 at an East Bay elementary school.
A school district official confirmed to KRON4 of a second COVID-19 outbreak at a high school.
A COVID-19 outbreak has occurred as the new school year begins here at Montclair Elementary School in Oakland.
According to an email from the principal to the Montclair School community:
“After consulting with the Alameda County Public Health Department Outbreak Team, it has been determined that there have been 3 or more cases within a class in the past 2 weeks that are epidemiologically linked.”
Oakland Unified School District Spokesperson John Sasaki has more details on the situation.
“We actually have a class closed at Montclair Elementary. All of those students are at home, isolating on the safe side. We don’t have any evidence of community transmission in that class or in the school but we just want to make sure that the kids in that class stay safe,” John Sasaki said.
In fact, the entire class will need to be fully quarantined for 10-days because the three positive COVID-19 cases meet the threshold for the state’s definition of an outbreak.
“To be perfectly honest with you, there has been another class at Oakland High School that is in the same situation. They had to shut that down to isolate at home to ensure that everyone stayed safe. We are doing a lot of contact tracing in cases like this where we have situations where we have to shut down class because we have a positive case,” Sasaki said.
To put this into perspective the Oakland Unified School District has 80 schools.
More than 35,000 students and so far, they have two classes that have been shut down due to COVID-19 outbreaks.
“I can tell you that during the past week we had 58-total student cases across the entire district and a total of 10 staff cases,” Sasaki said.
OUSD officials say even with mitigation measures in place, masks indoors and outdoors for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, modified classrooms, testing, and mandatory vaccinations for teachers it was inevitable that the pandemic would infiltrate into the classrooms.
“Our schools are microcosms of the community. We know that COVID exists in the community and so those kids probably came to school from their neighborhood or close contact that they had with other people. We’re trying to prevent what’s happening out in the community from spreading within the schools,” Sasaki said.