New positive result comes on heels of diagnosis last week
COVID-19 continued its reach down the hallways of Morgantown High School on Friday.
Another MHS student tested positive for the coronavirus and this one boomerangs back to an earlier diagnosis from last week.
The student most recently diagnosed was among those in quarantine over concerns of COVID-19 exposure in the prior case.
“That might be one good thing about this,” Mon Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said.
“He wasn’t in the building.”
Even so, the superintendent said, the district is sending its specially designated COVID cleaning and disinfecting crew to the school on Wilson Avenue, just because.
That work was done Saturday, Campbell said.
MHS will be open Monday for classes, he added.
Friday’s news comes two days after an entire fifth-grade class at Eastwood Elementary was sent home, following their teacher’s positive diagnosis.
It also means that Morgantown High made the coronavirus “outbreak” list on the state Department of Education website.
The department defines an outbreak as two or more positive cases associated with one school — be it under the roof or on the sidelines.
Morgantown High had yet to be added to that list Friday afternoon, which included 19 entries.
Twenty-four cases were shown at Cameron Elementary in Marshall County.
Ten more were chronicled at the bus garage for Upshur County Schools, and four were noted among the Capitol High football team in Charleston.
Charleston was where the state high school soccer tournament received an assist Friday morning — from the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Justices ruled Friday morning to lift a temporary restraining order for the tournament, which is hosted by the state Secondary Schools Activities Commission and fielded its final matches Saturday in Beckley.
The order was part of a lawsuit filed in Berkeley County by a husband and wife lawyer duo whose daughter plays for the Martinsburg High girls team.
They cited an overall lack of COVID-19 testing in the Martinsburg area, which they say affects their daughter and all athletes in Berkeley County Schools.
The ruling, though, comes with the coronavirus making a new trajectory across the state.
West Virginia is in the middle of a new surge of cases, as Morgantown High shows, but Justice said he wants schools and sports to be able to coexist with the coronavirus.
As new cases mount, however, it’s getting harder and harder to kick the ball into that net, he allowed Friday, in a briefing with reporters.
“These decisions are dog-flat tough,” the governor said.
David Cottrell, who is principal of Clay-Battelle Middle/High School and board president of the athletic commission, said Friday that the benefit of students will always be the motivator of those decisions — no matter how challenging they may be.
“We’re trying to give these kids as close to normal an experience they can have in the middle of a pandemic.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
