About 20 Haines School students are out of school quarantining as close contacts because of the continued community spread of coronavirus in town. There are no reported hospitalizations.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday, three elementary school students in three different grades tested positive for the virus. No close contacts at the school were identified in respect to those cases. Parents kept their children from school and had them tested when they were symptomatic, Getchell said.
The students who have left school because of close contact requirements can return to school eight days after their exposure to a person who’s tested positive as long as the quarantined student receives a negative test.
“The numbers of quarantines have gone up pretty substantially over the past two days,” superintendent Roy Getchell said. “It’s obvious there’s still a lot of covid within the community.”
Getchell said elementary grades are now being kept separate. The school is providing asymptomatic testing to students and staff. Getchell said it’s likely that case counts will spike in the coming days.
“This is a time to protect the school. We think it’s important for the school to stay open. We’re going to continue to need the support of the community to help get the covid rate back down to what it was earlier this summer,” Getchell said.
Across the borough, there were three positive cases on Friday and seven more on Tuesday. SEARHC didn’t conduct testing over the holiday weekend. Six of the Tuesday cases were symptomatic. One was an asymptomatic border test.
The number of active cases in Haines rose from 10 to 16 on Tuesday.
Christy Tengs Fowler, whose Pioneer Bar and Bamboo Room Restaurant have been closed for a month, was going to reopen last Thursday, Sept. 2, but both of her bartenders had been around someone who tested positive, so they self-isolated at home.
“So we couldn’t even plan,” Fowler said.
The state’s case, hospitalization and death rates rose last week. As of Tuesday, 21% of the total hospitalized population had COVID-19.