Alameda County’s official cumulative case count for Piedmont — up 40 in the last week from 1,611 to 1,651 — now roughly corresponds to the PUSD COVID-19 dashboard.
Last week the school district reported 42 student cases and 2 staff (including the interim superintendent, who reported to the school board from home at the August 24 meeting.) With in-person back-to-school nights on the horizon and case counts high in the schools, PUSD is asking parents to mask up in crowded classrooms.
Not surprisingly, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association cases among children under 18 in the U.S. have trended slightly upward over the past two weeks after stabilizing throughout July.
Source: Alameda County Covid-19 dashboard
Despite the uptick in school cases, according to the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, August 30, the summer surge is over but experts are reluctant to predict what comes next:
“I’ve been so humbled by the virus, I’m reluctant to make any predictions,” said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. “The good news is we’re coming out of the surge. But that doesn’t give me a great deal of comfort because when we reached our nadir the week before Thanksgiving last year, Southern Africa experienced omicron and within six weeks we were in the worst part of the pandemic we ever experienced.”