By: Veronica Kordmany
The Keio Academy in Westchester County, New York, has announced it will close its doors for the rest of the academic school year due to the COVID-19 virus, also known as ‘coronavirus’. The boarding school has not reported any confirmed cases of the virus.
The decision came after reports from the Rockland/Westchester Journal News said that the virus has spread to at least 82 people across Westchester.
Japan, which a portion of the school’s international population hails from, currently has 502 confirmed cases of the virus, and six people there have died from it — putting it in the top 10 countries globally who have been the hardest hit. There is also a Keio Academy in Japan, which the Westchester school is affiliated with.
“After consideration of all the medical facts and advice, the Board of Trustees has decided that it must act now in the interests of our students’ safety and wellbeing,” Rieko Ivy, director of development at the school, said in a statement.
Out of the entire student body, only 320 students, or 10%, resides in the local area. The rest are from other parts of the United States, as well as Europe, South Asia, and South America.
This decision comes after three cases were reported in New Rochelle’s Jewish day schools, causing them to close for an indeterminable amount of time. The schools are the Salanter Akiba Riverdale (SAR) Academy in the Bronx, the Westchester Day School in Mamaroneck, and the Westchester Torah Academy in White Plains.
Westchester is considered to be the ‘worst-hit’ county in New York, with an overwhelming 69 total cases. Almost all of them have been traced back to Midtown lawyer Lawrence Garbuz.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency Saturday amid the virus. He said Sunday that overnight, the number of cases in New York climbed from 89 cases to a staggering 105 with at least a dozen New York City patients.
“Westchester is an obvious problem for us,” Cuomo said. “They talk about the contagion in clusters, and then the clusters tend to infect more and more people.”
The most susceptible targets have been identified as the elderly population, whose immune systems are the most susceptible to illnesses such as the coronavirus. Nursing homes and senior living facilities in the New Rochelle area will be asked to suspend outside visitors, he said.
“Nursing homes are the most problematic setting for us,” given that the virus is most deadly for elderly and medically compromised patients, Cuomo said.
Across the world, there have been more than 100,000 cases, with at least 3,000 deaths, since the outbreak emerged in Wuhan, China.