Gov. Gavin Newsom’s child is quarantining after schoolmate’s positive COVID-19 test

One of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s four children is quarantining at home after a Sacramento private school classmate tested positive for COVID-19, the governor’s office said Friday.

No one in the Newsom family has tested positive for the coronavirus, said the governor’s communications director, Nathan Click. All six family members, he said, are observing quarantine procedures and have been for several days.

“The family has taken the potential exposure seriously and is following all state protocols,” Click said in an emailed statement.

The governor and his wife have two girls and two boys, ranging in age from 4 to 11 years old. The child who was potentially exposed to the virus was not identified for security reasons.

Newsom took a rapid COVID-19 test earlier this week that came back negative, Click said, though he did not specify what day. The other five family members, including First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and the four children, all received negative results after taking the nasal swab PCR test.

Click said the governor plans to have a PCR test this weekend.

The brush with the virus, first reported Friday by Politico, comes after the first family’s Sacramento elementary school resumed in-person instruction earlier this month. Three of the children are in elementary school, where full-day classes have been held this month Mondays through Thursdays with early dismissal on Fridays. The youngest child is in pre-kindergarten.

Information published by the school states that all students and personnel are to wear masks and are subject to mandatory COVID-19 testing, along with other public health protocols while on campus.

The governor’s child who shared the classroom with the infected student has been tested twice, according to Newsom’s office, on the fifth and seventh day after the last contact with the classmate.

Newsom’s personal experiences with pandemic precautions have dominated the headlines this week, after he apologized for attending a longtime advisor’s birthday party at a Napa Valley restaurant earlier this month — one where members of as many as a half-dozen different households sat close to each other and did not follow the mask protocols the governor’s administration has recommended to Californians.

Sacramento County was listed as having evidence of “substantial” spread — the red tier in the state’s coronavirus reopening system — when the private school returned to a full-day schedule. Newsom told a reporter last month that his kids were transitioning to a “phased-in approach” to in-person learning at the time.

But the region’s largest public schools did not open under those conditions, which were downgraded last week to the “widespread” purple tier of the state system. Those schools now cannot open, although schools that opened before the status change are not required to return to full-time remote learning.

“The governor has made the safety of students and staff a priority during the COVID-19 pandemic and has fought to ensure that every child — whether in a classroom or at home — is learning,” Click said in the Friday night statement.