Los Angeles school officials on Wednesday confirmed the first coronavirus outbreak in the district at Grant Elementary School in Hollywood, sending home an entire classroom of children.
“The cases are concentrated in a single classroom and Los Angeles Unified is fully cooperating with the Department of Public Health,” the district said in a statement. “The district has alerted all those potentially impacted and the quarantined class has been provided with instructional materials to continue their studies.”
An outbreak is defined as three more cases over 14 days that are likely linked to one another. Wednesday was the eighth day of classes in the nation’s second-largest school system. Up through Tuesday afternoon, the district had reported no cases linked to spread at a school setting since the start of the academic year.
On Tuesday at 10 p.m., the district updated its online dashboard to record the seven linked cases at Grant.
In all, there are 11 active cases at Grant, according to a district dashboard; some schools have more, but they have not at this time been linked to transmission at the campus.
The latest district figures record 2,304 active cases. During the first week of school, about 6,500 students missed one or more days of class either because of testing positive or because of being a close contact of an infected individual. That works out to about 1 of every 70 students.
