I just got the following message from my kid’s school:
Dear Families,
I was just notified by a member of our parent/volunteer community at (your school) that they have tested presumptive positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus after having been diagnosed and hospitalized with a different illness in February. This is brand new information and students are already on their way to school, so we are taking the following steps immediately to minimize any further exposure to our school community:
- Students who may have been exposed in the classroom are going to be contained as soon as they come off the bus and parents will be contacted to pick them up.
- Parents of all students can pick up at any time by coming to the front office and checking them out. This is especially recommended for any medically fragile students.
- Staff who are considered immune compromised or medically fragile should work with the administration to leave.
- We have contacted Public Health Seattle & King County and will keep you informed as this is a rapidly changing situation.
- (The school) will be closed on Thursday, March 5 for deep disinfecting.
The parent/volunteer was at the Art Walk on Friday and volunteered in the classroom on Monday.
My middle son, who has Down Syndrome, was born in the above-pictured hospital, the site of the first US coronavirus death. He’s always been healthy, but he has a different genome than the rest of us and of course who knows what that means with this virus? Now I found out the my youngest son’s school has a parent volunteer that may very well have been in his classroom (they split time with me and their mom and are at their mom’s during the school week). Can anyone hazard a guess as to why this person wasn’t tested andMY KID has been exposed to COVID-19?
It’s because local health clinics lacked either tests, or the authorization to test, or had faulty tests.
From the linked article put out last week:
As many as 40 state public health labs could begin testing for the COVID-19 virus using parts of the test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as early as this week, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL).
"As of now: @CDCgov & @US_FDA developed a new protocol using 2 of 3 components of original test kit. Many public health labs are able to use the original kit w/out problem component to begin testing as soon as this week," APHL said on its Twitter feed.
Earlier this month, the CDC's rollout of test kits was delayed after problems were found with some the kits' reagent. The APHL wrote a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Feb 24, asking the agency for enforcement discretion to allow state and local public health labs the ability to create a laboratory-developed test for the detection of the novel coronavirus.
On Twitter, the APHL said its scientists were in talks all day yesterday with the FDA and CDC to figure out a way to allow labs to use functioning tests.
This shit just got very, very real for me.
Consider me the canary in the mine.
Fuck.