Los Angeles County Health Department officials today released the first data on Covid cases during the first week of school: In the 24 hours between Tuesday at 8 a.m and Wednesday at 8 a.m, the Los Angeles School District recorded 118 new cases. Classes resumed on Monday.
The vast majority of those cases — 107 — were among students at school. Four were discovered among participants in youth sports. One at day care. Six cases were found among workers at the district office or other related worksites. Fifty-six of the 118 cases were singular infections, meaning no other cases had yet been associated with them.
See chart below.
The chart does not, however, show the number of students and staff who were quarantined after close contact. That number in other districts has been much greater.
The much smaller Blue Ribbon Oak Park school district in Ventura County, which started a week earlier than L.A. Unified, reported 28 cases among students and staff. The number of close contacts now quarantined at home for 10 days, however, is 97. Minus staff, that’s 120 students removed from school in the first 10 days of the semester. Put another way, it’s just about 3% of the district’s 4,379 students. LAUSD has 628,468 students this fall.
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The LAUSD news comes after the city reported its highest number of daily new cases — over 4,000 — since January on Wednesday.
The district required students and staff to undergo Covid-19 testing, baseline screening conducted in the two weeks before school. Those tests uncovered more than 3,600 previously unreported positive cases.
That’s equivalent to another full day of cases for L.A. County, which has been reporting around 3,000-3,500 new cases every 24 hours, of late, according to County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer.
According to statistics released late Monday, the first day of fall classes in the LAUSD, roughly 81% of the district’s students underwent baseline Covid testing between Aug. 2-15, and 3,255 of them tested positive for the virus. That’s a testing-positivity rate of roughly 0.8%. That was far below the countywide positivity rate of 3.5% on Monday, but could change as kids begin to gather en masse.