21 students at East Bay high school get COVID after attending off-campus event
By KTVU Staff article
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - An East Bay high school is grappling with a COVID outbreak that s infected almost 2 dozen students and forced another 100 into quarantine.
Twenty-one students at Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek have the virus, John Nickerson, superintendent of Acalanes Union High School District, said.
The explosion in cases was tied to an off-campus event, he said.
Nickerson said the students tested positive in the last two weeks of April. The origin of the cases seems to have been a single off-campus (and non-school) event that the students who tested positive attended or in some cases their siblings attended, he said in a statement. There does not appear to have been any on-campus transmission of COVID-19.
Upgrading ventilation systems is a key way schools can reduce the spread of the coronavirus when campuses reopen, but some districts in California are finding the cost of those upgrades to be insurmountable.
Some districts have recently been able to upgrade their HVAC systems using local bond money. Some hope that the Legislature will place a multi-billion bond on the 2022 state ballot to provide new money for school facilities. Others are hoping President-elect Joe Biden will push through infrastructure legislation that includes money for schools. But few funding streams are guaranteed, and they may not be sufficient to cover the regular inspections and stringent filter replacements that HVAC systems require.