Greenbrier school officials respond to positive COVID test

LEWISBURG, WV (WOAY) – The Greenbrier Health Department alerted school officials upon learning of a student testing positive for COVID-19.

Upon learning this, Greenbrier County Schools went ahead with its plan to close the school, in this case, Greenbrier West, for three days to allow for contact tracing and extra cleaning measures. The contact tracing allowed nurses to make sure that there wasn’t a large number of students exposed to the one who tested positive.

“If there were a lot of people exposed to that individual, we would probably have to close the school for longer than three days,” said Greenbrier County Schools’ Lead Nurse Paula McCoy. “But initially, we planned for three days to see if we could complete contact tracing during that time. In this case, we could, and in fact, even the Health Department said that if we chose not to close, that would have been fine with them.”

McCoy added that the school nurses weren’t expecting to have zero cases throughout the year and that she is happy with the response to the first one.

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