CARLSBAD, Calif. – A group of ninth graders and teachers from a California private school has been quarantined in China after seven of them tested positive for swine flu on a school trip.

Caroline Callaway, a spokeswoman for Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, said six students and one teacher have been diagnosed with the virus and are recovering in a hospital in Yichang.

Three other students and a teacher are in the hospital with other illnesses.

The bulk of the group — 25 students and five teachers — has been quarantined in a nearby hotel for a week, but were expected to be released Thursday.

Each student was being held in a different room with a television and phone. Hotel employees make food runs for the students, who were not allowed to have personal contact with anyone — not even each other.

“In the hotel, they’re kind of shouting across the hotel and calling each other,” Callaway said Wednesday.

Employees at Beijing’s swine flu command center and at the hotel say that the group was cleared for release Thursday. It was not clear when the hospitalized students and teachers would be released and allowed to return to California.

The group of 35 ninth-graders left for China on June 2. Before the quarantine, they climbed the Great Wall, explored the immense plazas of the Forbidden City and visited the Terra Cotta Warriors in the inland city of Xi’an.

The group had embarked on a river cruise to Three Gorges Dam when a handful of students and one teacher started feeling sick and saw a doctor on board.