District meals program resumes Tuesday
Food employee’s COVID test result was false positive
KINGSTON, N.Y. » A Kingston school district food-service employee has tested negative for COVID-19 after initially receiving a false positive result, and the district will resume normal distribution of meals on Tuesday.
The district posted on its website Friday afternoon that the employee was “retested by a New York state facility, and this test has come back negative. Because there is no longer an immediate health concern, [district] meal distribution will take place as normal on Tuesday, September
29th.”
The Kingston school district is closed Monday because of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.
Kingston, like many districts, has been distributing meals to students even though school buildings are closed due to the coronavirus and all instruction is being given online. Kingston provides food to about 560 students daily.
The district suspended all food-service operations Thursday — “out of an abundance of caution,” it said — after the food worker tested positive for COVID. The district said at the time that the shutdown was implemented even though “the Ulster County Department of Health believes this may be a false positive.”
In all, four of the 10 positive COVID test results that Ulster
County reported Thursday were found to be incorrect, officials said Friday. Results had yet to been received from follow-up tests on the other six people.
Meals for Kingston school district students are
all prepared in one central kitchen, which is why the program had to be halted when the food-service worker initially tested positive for COVID. More than two dozen people work in the kitchen.
Because of the food-service shutdown, the Kingston district on Friday established a “pop-up meal distribution” program at
four of its buildings. Packaged meals were available at Chambers, John F. Kennedy and George Washington elementary schools and J. Watson Bailey Middle School.
The Friday meals initiative was made possible on short notice by the Kingston Emergency Food Collaborative, the Salvation Army, The People’s Place, Hudson Valley Current and Family of Woodstock, the school district said.
For more information regarding Kingston school district food services, call (845) 943-3663 or email foodservice@kingstoncityschools.org. Also, the Ulster County Department of Health can be reached at (845) 443-8888.
Anyone in the county with food insecurity concerns can call (845) 4438888 or go to covid19.ulstercountyny.gov.
By the numbers
On its online COVID-19 dashboard Friday, Ulster County reported one new case out of the most recent 637 tests conducted, a rate of less than 0.2%.
The dashboard showed
110 active cases of COVID in the county as of Thursday, down from 115 a day earlier.
Dutchess County’s COVID dashboard on Friday reported 151 active cases as of Wednesday, up from 138 a day earlier.