Summer camps hit with COVID outbreaks -- are schools next?
The U.S. has seen a string of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to summer camps in recent weeks in places such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas, in what some fear could be a preview of the upcoming school year.
In some cases the outbreaks have spread from the camp to the broader community.
The clusters have come as the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. has reversed course, surging more than 60% over the past two weeks from an average of about 12,000 a day to about 19,500, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The rise in many places has been blamed on too many unvaccinated people and the highly contagious delta variant.
Gwen Ford, a 43-year-old science teacher from Adrian, Missouri, was cautiously optimistic when she eyed the dropping case numbers in the spring and signed up her 12-year-old daughter for the West Central Christian Service Camp in Missouri.
But one day after her daughter got home from a week of playing in the camp pool, worshipping with friends and bunking in a dormitory, Ford got an email about an outbreak and then learned that her daughter's camp buddy was infected.
“And we were like, ’Oh, my gosh. This was someone you were around quite a bit,'" she recalled, adding that her daughter ultimately tested negative. Ford said she definitely plans to get her daughter vaccinated. “It was very nerve-wracking. It kind of seems like we finally felt comfortable and it happened.”
A note posted on the camp’s Facebook page showed that the camp nurse and several faculty and volunteers were among those infected. Staff members at the camp did not return a call for comment.
JoAnn Martin, administrator of the public health agency in surrounding Pettis County, lamented the difficulty in getting people to take the virus seriously...
