No New Cases Following Latest COVID Outbreak At Montco School

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, PA — The latest outbreak of coronavirus in a Montgomery County school district has not resulted in any more cases as of Tuesday, officials confirmed.

The cluster of cases, found at Penn Valley Elementary School in the Lower Merion School District, sickened eight young students as well as two family members of the students. The spread was particularly unusual because both of those family members were fully vaccinated.

The rest of the class in which the cases were found remains in quarantine, and both the school district and the Montgomery County Office of Public Health are continuing to investigate the case.

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Both compromised air flow in the classroom, as well as the presence of more contagious variants, have been pointed to as potential causes of this outbreak, though there is no certainty on either front, officials said.

Transmission in schools, particularly among younger students, has been rare. Meanwhile, less than 0.1 percent of fully vaccinated Pennsylvanians have tested positive for the virus, the Department of Health said last week, indicating an extremely high effectivity rate thus far.

The news comes as Montgomery County's vaccination rate continues to climb and schools in many parts of the county begin to return to a sense of normalcy. After a "fourth wave" of the virus hit the county and much of the region in March and April, numbers appear to be declining this week, with the county showing notably improved metrics over the most recently tracked seven-day period.