A Summer Camp Covid-19 Outbreak Offers Back-to-School Lessons

At one, in Georgia, more than 250 children and young adults tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to a recent report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The agency’s analysis shows that, contrary to some early studies, children of all ages can get infected, pass the virus on to others, and, the authors write, “might play an important role in transmission.” Public health experts say the outbreak, coupled with newly published research on coronavirus spread among children, has a lot to teach decisionmakers about how to proceed with school reopening plans as cases continue to surge uncontrollably throughout many parts of the country.This single outbreak at a summer camp in northern Georgia is a case in point, showing how rapidly the infection can spread among kids once they’ve been returned to any sort of typical social network. Studies conducted in countries where officials reopened their schools found that transmission among kids was low in Norway, Denmark, and parts of Germany that had an overall low incidence of the virus, and where school officials shrank class sizes and adopted social distancing practices on campus, while countries like Israel faced rampant outbreaks after reopening without making these changes.And milder symptoms mean kids often don’t get tested, and then their infections—and role in any subsequent spread—go unrecorded. (For questions about the outbreak, a Georgia Department of Public Health spokesman referred WIRED to the CDC report.)According to the report, High Harbour followed many of the CDC’s recommendations for summer camps, including enhanced cleaning and disinfection procedures, staggering the use of communal spaces, and requiring physical distancing outside of cabins. (Officials of the YMCA of Metropolitan Atlanta did not contest these details, saying only in their statement that High Harbour made every effort to follow CDC guidelines and has cooperated with the agency in its investigation.)The CDC report concluded that in 28 of the camp’s 31 cabins, at least one person, and often many, tested positive. Evidence for airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has been building for months, making it clearer just how important the roles of masks, physical distancing, and good ventilation are in stemming the disease’s spread.In an emailed statement, officials at the YMCA’s national office told WIRED that the organization worked with the American Camp Association, the CDC, and a consortium of infectious disease, medical, and sanitation experts to publish health and safety guidelines for all Y camps, to use in determining if and how they could operate. Of those overnight camps that did open, we are not aware of any other Covid-19 outbreaks, nor are we aware of any camps that chose to close in reaction to the situation at High Harbour,” they wrote.States are required to report any positive cases of Covid-19 to the federal government, a process which has been complicated as of late due to a disastrous data-collection turf war between the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services. That makes it hard to know if the High Harbour outbreak is an outlier or a signifier of what awaits efforts to reunite children with IRL classrooms.Many state public health departments that WIRED contacted did not collect information about outbreaks at summer camps, or would only provide it under a formal records request. By comparison, in the last week Georgia has recorded an average of 3,372 daily cases, an increase of 13 percent from the average two weeks earlier.Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.Amy Wesolowski, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says the High Harbour example shows that asking for proof of negative coronavirus tests before large gatherings isn’t a sufficient preventative tactic on its own. A high school in Mississippi has also sent 40 students into quarantine after three tested positive shortly after the start of the semester.About two-thirds of states in the US, largely in the South and West, are currently experiencing “uncontrolled” community spread, according to public health researchers at Covid Exit Strategy, a nonpartisan group tracking state-by-state testing and hospitalization data.