A Westchester County boarding school with no confirmed cases of the coronavirus will close for the rest of the school year amid fears over the deadly bug, a new report says.
The Keio Academy of New York, which has ties to a Japanese university, announced that it will close its campus in Purchase to protect its international student body from the virus that has spread to at least 82 people in Westchester, the Rockland/Westchester Journal News reported.
Japan currently has 502 confirmed cases of the virus, and six people there have died from it — putting it in the top 10 countries globally who have been the hardest hit.
“After consideration of all the medical facts and advice, the Board of Trustees has decided that it must act now in the interests of our students’ safety and wellbeing,” Rieko Ivy, director of development at the school, said in a statement.
The private school, which is affiliated with Keio University in Japan, hosts students flung from Asia, Europe and South America.
Only 10 percent of the student body, which numbers around 320, is from the local area, while the rest hail from other parts of the US and various countries.
The school said the decision was a precautionary measure as no cases have been identified there.
“This is our precautious decision before any case should occur,” Ivy said, according to the outlet.
The school did not respond to a request for comment from The Post on Sunday.
The decision comes after three Jewish day schools linked to an outbreak in New Rochelle, also in Westchester County, were forced to at least temporarily close.
They are the Salanter Akiba Riverdale Academy in The Bronx, the Westchester Day School in Mamaroneck and the Westchester Torah Academy in White Plains. The latter two schools are in Westchester County. At least one case, involving a female student, has been confirmed at Salanter.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency Saturday amid the virus. He said Sunday that overnight, the number of cases in New York climbed to 105 from 89 the day before, with at least a dozen New York City patients.
Across the world, there have been more than 100,000 cases, with at least 3,000 deaths, since the outbreak emerged in Wuhan, China.
