33 Lafourche Parish students in quarantine after football player tests positive for COVID-19

Telcis Theresa Cantrelle
October 5, 2020
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Thirty-three Lafourche Parish students are in quarantine after a Central Lafourche High School football player tested positive for COVID-19 on Saturday, Kenny Delcambre, Director of Secondary Education for the Lafourche Parish School District (LPSD), told the Times this afternoon.


The player started for the Trojans in their matchup against the South Lafourche Tarpons on Friday night and played “most of the game,” Delcambre said.

Later on that night, the player began to feel ill, Delcambre said, and his mother brought him to urgent care on Saturday morning and got him tested. After she received the results, she immediately informed Central Lafourche, he said.

After the Central Lafourche, South Lafourche and LPSD administrations were all notified, the contact tracing began and each respective group watched the game multiple times, taking notes of who the student came in contact with, Delcambre said.


“Once we were able to compare our notes and get a definitive understanding of who this student made direct contact with, then we knew who needed to be quarantined from that standpoint,” he continued. “At the same time, Central Lafourche was also working on the contact tracing going all the way back to Thursday because 48 hours prior to the first symptom is when you do contact tracing.”

The contact tracing included classrooms and any other areas on campus the student might have been to, Delcambre noted. Close contacts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), include any individual within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes.

Delcambre said all the students (26 from Central Lafourche and seven from South Lafourche) from that needed to quarantine were notified by Sunday afternoon. For the remainder of their 14 days from the date they came in contact with the positive individual, the students will be learning virtually.


“We started this school year 100 percent virtually, so we have that system still set up,” Delcambre said. “Even though we’re back with most of our students, we still have approximately 25 percent of our total enrollment that’s still choosing the virtual option. But even for the kids that have chosen to come back in person, we still have that infrastructure set up so that they can easily transition to virtual.”

This is the first positive at an athletic event, Delcambre noted, but not the first COVID-19 case in the school system. “We have almost 15,000 kids and 2,000 employees in this system,” he said. “This is not the first time that we had to deal with the process of identifying a positive case and then doing the contact tracing.”

“Within the classroom, we are taking measures to the greatest extent that we can so that in the event that we do have a positive, we can try to minimize that impact with quarantine as much as possible,” he continued. 


Both teams are still scheduled to play their respective games on Friday, Delcambre said, as coaches feel they can still safely play despite losing some players due to quarantine. However, he noted, the games could still be postponed because of Tropical Storm Delta, which could potentially hit Louisiana as a hurricane on Friday. He said a decision on that could come Wednesday afternoon. 

“For now, absent the hurricane, they’re still planning to play on Friday,” Delcambre added. “Like everything else in the world of COVID, that decision could change depending on what the next few days bring. But for now, that’s the goal.”