There has been another exposure to COVID-19 at a West Vancouver elementary school.
Families at Hollyburn Elementary received a notice Tuesday, informing them of a person testing positive for COVID-19 who had been in the school on Oct. 2 and is now in self-isolation at home.
Families in the Division 4 Grade 4 and 5 class at the school have been told to monitor themselves for symptoms and isolate immediately if those develop.
The notice, which identifies the class at risk, appears to give more information than was previously available to families at schools where potential exposure to COVID-19 occurred.
Parents in West Vancouver have been asking health authorities for more information about possible exposures so they can assess their own risks and take precautions – including precautions outside of the school setting, at sports and social events.
Meanwhile, Vancouver Coastal Health is doing contact tracing to see who might have been in close contact with the person at Hollyburn who has the virus while they were infectious.
Hollyburn Elementary is the seventh school in West Vancouver where parents have been warned of a possible COVID-19 exposure since students went back to school.
Parents at Caulfeild Elementary, Sentinel Secondary, Rockridge Secondary, West Vancouver Secondary and Collingwood and Mulgrave private schools have all received similar notices over the past several weeks.
In some cases, like West Vancouver and Rockridge secondaries, either the individual who tested positive didn’t expose anyone else during their infectious period or only a few students were asked to self-isolate.
At Caulfeild – the worst situation so far – two classes were told to self-isolate and up to 16 people including students, siblings and parents subsequently tested positive for the virus.
A group of West Vancouver parents led by Caulfeild mom Coralynn Gehl now have a petition to health authorities circulating online asking them to change the way they handle COVID-19 cases in schools.
The parents want entire classes/cohorts isolated when potential exposures are reported and siblings also kept at home when there is a case in a school setting.
On Wednesday, the online petition had garnered more than 2,000 signatures province-wide.
According to B.C.’s Centre for Disease Control, province-wide a very low number of children and youth under 20 have tested positive for COVID-19, despite increasing numbers of tests in that age group since school started. Currently only seven out of 1,000 tests for those under 20 have come back positive.
As of Oct. 1, 533 youth aged 10 to 19 had tested positive for COVID-19 province-wide while 303 children under 10 had tested positive.
Information from B.C.’s Centre for Disease Control does show, however, that the number of cases among school-aged children being reported each week has been rising steadily since the end of August.
