Marinscope
If you know your child has COVID and are told to keep him or her out of school – but you don’t – is that criminal?
That’s the question Marin County District Attorney Lori E. Frugoli is contemplating.
The D.A.’s announcement comes in the wake of a situation at Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera which resulted in 8 children testing positive for COVID and 75 children being quarantined.
On Nov. 9, the Marin County Health and Human Services Department was notified by a health care provider that two children had been tested for COVID and one of them had tested positive. The parents were allegedly told to keep both children out of school.
The parents sent the kids to school anyway. No one – either the parents or county health, notified the school. The kids went to school beginning Nov. 9 and it wasn’t until Nov. 18 the school found out.
That sent the school scrambling to deal with the exposure. In the end, eight children at the school tested positive for COVID and 75 kids were quarantined.
Dr. Lisa Santora, deputy public health officer, told the Independent Journal that this is the first time such a protocol breach has occurred in Marin during the pandemic.
And now the D.A. is looking into the parents and their potential liability.
Frugoli said law enforcement authorities are “working on the case and when their investigation is finished, they will submit it to my office. We will then review it to see whether any laws were violated.”
She added that “As in all cases, we are bound by legal obligations to make sure we can prove a law was violated at a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt before proceeding forward. We are also bound by ethical standards not to talk about the details of a case before it has been adjudicated. This could take some time, so I am urging everyone to have patience. Justice is designed to seek the truth and cannot be hurried.”
The parents have not been publicly identified.
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