After following up on a weekend scare in which a child tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday, summer camp administrators at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, in consultation with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, concluded that the camp can safely continue running this week.
The female camper who tested positive attended Hayground the week of Aug. 3. She was asymptomatic and had already had a positive antibody test in June. After testing positive for the virus in a diagnostic test recently, she then tested negative, according to an email sent to families late Sunday afternoon. "The doctor's best guess is that she is still shedding the virus internally. He also believes she is not contagious. But there is not enough science yet to prove this definitively," the camp administrators wrote.
Five other campers and two counselors were in the "pod" with her, and all have tested negative for Covid-19 since Hayground informed them of the issue, the camp letter said.
"The camper who originally tested positive and then tested negative has not been at Hayground since Aug. 7," the administrators wrote. "Since she left, our cleaning crew has cleaned campus every single day and our deep-cleaning crew (who come on the weekends) have deep-cleaned twice."
According to the Hayground letter, the County Health Department said the typical chain of contact tracing would have excluded the camp in the first place.
"You did more than you had to do," a Health Department nurse told the camp, according to the letter. "You were not in the radius. We wouldn't have even called you."
The camp administrators reiterated their belief that it is safe to continue operating, but they are also allowing families to pull their kids out of camp if they feel it is necessary. Doug Weitz, the camp director, said by phone Monday that no campers have withdrawn. There are approximately 60 children at the camp at any one time.
"My own kids go here. Every decision I'm making has to sort of pass the my-own-kids test," Mr. Weitz said. "I'm not going to send my kids to a place that is dangerous. It's comforting, I think, for a lot of parents who know that I have kids and that they are here."
The brief Covid-19 scare was the only incident of its nature this summer, he said. Temperatures are checked daily with infrared thermometers before campers get out of their parents' cars and only once did a student register a fever, but upon a second check using an ear thermometer it was determined that the student did not actually have a fever.
Mr. Weitz said Sunday's letter to parents "wasn't just about this one letter."
"Over the course of the spring and early this summer, every correspondence we've sent out has been radically transparent and completely honest," he said. "People recognize that and they trust us. If we say this is what happened, they know this is what happened."