Coronavirus: 62 football players quarantined at Palm Beach Central

The first outbreak of COVID-19 in the county’s schools may trace its origins to Halloween day, when dozens of Palm Beach Central High football players and coaches were confined to buses for a two-hour rain delay.

But contact tracers also discovered a social scene in which students sometimes neglected masks and ignored rules of distancing before and after games, the county's top health authority said Monday.

More: High school football: Palm Beach Central cancels regular-season finale due to COVID

The investigation that began with one sick coach and one sick kid on Nov. 1 triggered the quarantine of 62 players and eventually grew to include 16 students and four coaches who tested positive, said Dr. Alina Alonso, director of the Florida Health Department in Palm Beach County.

"Whether it was the bus or another situation, we don't know definitively. We do know a number of students transmitted the virus," Deputy Superintendent Keith Oswald said.

Other schools have recorded multiple positive cases. And plenty of teams across the county have had sick players, but none to date has seen the virus spread among students and staff as happened at Central High, Alonso said.

"We want to keep this contained and keep this just at Palm Beach Central. This could have easily expanded," said Alonso, whose staff did not find evidence of contagion during the school day.

"School is not where the transmissions are happening. It's outside of school," Alonso said. "We were able to contain it due to very quick contact tracing."

But even as the team began to rebound from illness, players and their parents say they suffered another hit when the district announced Friday that Central couldn't finish the already abbreviated season.

"We still have enough players to play," said Roosevelt Tessono, whose son is a senior on the team and remained healthy throughout. "Why should the entire season be cancelled?"

Parents note that many players have now cleared their quarantine or recovered from the illness and been given the go-ahead to return to school. Why should returning to the field be different, they ask.

In a regular season that was supposed to pack at least four matchups, the team played only one, the Oct. 31 season opener against Glades Central, a 41-0 loss at Wellington High.

As schools reopened and faced with a late start to the season, the district's athletic office built a schedule that stacked high school games at three campuses with artificial turf, allowing teams to square off on Friday nights and three times on Saturdays.

When the skies unleashed over the Wellington field that Halloween, parents wondered why players weren't directed to sit out the delay inside the school buildings or alternatively sent home.

Instead they huddled on a bus -- not the standard yellow school bus, one more akin to a charter, but confining all the same.

"Getting COVID was not on my mind at that time," said senior player Jaheim Shannon, who said he was focused on the game ahead. His coaches however, were thinking about it. They reminded players to keep masks on, he said. Shannon never came down with the illness.

That admonition seems to have paid off, said Alonso.

"The fact that only 16 were sick means many were wearing their mask properly. Two hours on a bus, everybody would've become positive if someone weren't wearing their masks," Alonso said.

Oswald said he is investigating the decision to stay on the bus.

But there were certainly slip-ups elsewhere.

Contact tracers employed by the health department report some students admitted to not wearing masks and hanging out in close quarters during the time span in question, Alonso said.

At one point in the investigation, rumors surfaced about a Halloween party, but there was no evidence that anyone in question went, Alonso said.

The health authorities not only kept tabs on 62 Palm Beach Central students in quarantine, but also their Glades Central opponents. No one on that latter team wound up confined because no case of COVID developed.

Earlier in the season, Forest Hill High lost a game when multiple players and coaches were sidelined under COVID guidelines. Oswald said

COVID has also put an early end to John I Leonard High's football season. The district's COVID dashboard reports two cases confirmed on Nov. 10. Alonso reports the school has one positive student and several close contacts who now are under quarantine and being monitored. Unless one of those contacts develops the illness, there is no student-to-student transmission there.

At Palm Beach Central, five students in quarantine -- what Alonso calls a subset of the original cases -- tested positive Nov. 7.

"So it was a very good thing we quarantined them because they would've continued spreading," Alonso said.

The last of the Central High quarantines lifts Nov. 28, she said.

That leaves the players free to participate in a tri-county tournament with teams from Miami-Dade or Broward. But parents remain unsatisfied. They want the district to plan make-up games for the three missed and say they will take the case to the school board meeting Tuesday.

Without those matchups, the team won't be prepared to compete with others that have logged more game time, Tessono said. And that means less opportunity to shine for college scouts.

sisger@pbpost.com

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Coronavirus: 62 football players quarantined at Palm Beach Central

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