Unvaccinated, unmasked teacher spreads Covid-19 to elementary school students, CDC reports

An unvaccinated teacher who showed up in her classroom at Marine County, California Elementary School while experiencing symptoms such as “coughing, autoimmune fever, and headache” ended up infecting half of her students with Covid-19, as well as some members of his student family. , Mine A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Released on Friday.

Officials with the Marin County Department of Public Health launched an investigation into the classroom outbreak on May 26, three days after a teacher reported a positive COVID-19 test result. The teacher, who initially attributed the symptoms to allergies, was one of only two staff members who were not vaccinated at the elementary school.

Of the 24 students, 22 students who did not qualify for vaccination due to age were tested. According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, 12 people have tested positive for the virus a report, written by county health officials and experts from the University of California’s Berkeley, Davis and Santa Cruz campuses.

Children younger than 12 are not eligible for vaccination, which means their safety depends on other adults being vaccinated to reduce exposure to the virus, according to the CDC.

Experts concluded that the attack rate in the affected class was 50 percent, but students who sat close to the teacher’s desk had a higher risk of infection. The CDC reported that the attack rate in the two classrooms near the teacher’s office was 80 percent.

The majority of students sitting in the first two rows of the class contracted the virus, while a minority of those at the back of the class contracted the virus. According to the report, the teacher sometimes reads aloud to students without a mask, despite the school’s requirement to avoid the mask indoors.

Four students from other classrooms have also tested positive for Covid-19. They were all siblings of three students in the teacher’s unvaccinated classroom, “and the exposure was supposed to happen in their homes,” the CDC reported.

According to the report, four parents of children at the school later contracted the outbreak. Of the affected parents, only one was vaccinated. The vaccination showed symptoms such as fever, chills, cough, headache and loss of smell.

In addition, six students of a different grade also tested positive for Covid-19 after one of the students shared an dormitory with two other students in the same class, the CDC reported. All affected students this semester were ineligible for vaccination due to age.

Some evidence collected during the investigation indicates that “infections occurring in the two species were most likely part of the same outbreak”.

A total of 26 primary school students and their contacts were infected after exposure to the unvaccinated teacher. The CDC concluded that at least 18 of them contracted the delta variant.

The report states that “the attack rate of the outbreak highlights the increased transmissibility of the delta variant and the potential for rapid spread, especially in unvaccinated populations such as school-age children who are too young to be vaccinated.”

Experts also concluded that the impact of the outbreak on the broader community may be limited thanks to Marin County’s high vaccination rate, one of the best in California. At the time of the outbreak, 72 percent of eligible people had been fully vaccinated in the city where the school is located, according to the report.

However, new evidence of “high transmissibility of the delta variant, even among fully vaccinated people, supports recommendations for Universal hiding place in schools. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says: Appropriate masking, routine testing, ventilation, and staying home while symptoms appear are important to ensure safe education.