NYC HS Moves to All-Remote Learning Due to Positive COVID Cases Before School Even Started

A high school in Queens, New York, moved to all-remote learning on Wednesday prior to the start of the school year due positive cases of the novel coronavirus.

Henry Renelus, principal of the PS721Q high school in the Queens neighborhood of Elmhurst, sent a letter to members of the school's community notifying them that the building will remain closed for the next two weeks.

According to the letter, the school was shut down for an initial 24 hours after "two or more members of our school community tested positive"—but noted that after, "the NYC Test + Trace Corps and the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have determined that at this time the main building site must remain closed for 14 days."

The PS721Q school will have students learning remotely for the next two weeks.

The letter from Renelus also urged community members to follow the "Core Four" actions to mitigate the spread of the novel virus, which include staying home if you feel sick; following physical distancing measures; wearing a protective face mask; and practicing healthy hand hygiene.

Across New York City, schools faced delayed reopenings amid the pandemic and were set to begin in-person classes on Thursday.

The decision to move to all-remote learning by the Queens' high school comes as New York City has seen an increase in its testing positivity rate, rising over 3 percent.

"We have a very unusual situation here where we have an uptick in a discrete set of ZIP codes and we are not seeing an interconnection to our public school system," New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday. "We will watch it very carefully, daily, hourly. And if at any point we determine we need to close an individual school or any number of schools in that area, we will."

The rise in the testing positivity rate prompted the city's largest teachers' union warned that if the rate continued to rise, "the city must adopt a strategy to close public facilities—including the more the 80 public schools—in the hard-hit neighborhoods."

"We worked hard to get our public schools to a safe place and so far there has been no indication of widespread infection in school buildings. But the same cannot be said for some zip codes in New York City, where infection rate is escalating," United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew wrote in a statement on Tuesday. "The city's plan has been to switch to remote instruction for all students if the citywide infection rate reaches 3 percent on a seven-day rolling average. But the city can't sit by and let the virus spread in these or other zip codes for days until it drives the overall city rate above the seven-day threshold."

Across New York City, there are currently over 239,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, as well as more than 19,000 deaths.

Newsweek reached out to the PS721Q high school and the New York City Department of Education for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.