COVID-19: School facing challenge of screening

If the government announced, Monday, the increase in the health protocol at Level 3, it intends to maintain the open classes as much as possible. On the ground, the educational community questions the feasibility and the consequences of such a strategy.

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“The priority remains and will remain to preserve the education of our children”: the commitment made by the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, Monday 6 December to the evening, at the end of a press conference allowing him to decline the Government response to the fifth wave of COVID-19, has generated contrasting reactions within the educational community.

With, on the one hand, parents of students rather satisfied that schools remain open and the school holidays are not anticipated – a track away, Monday morning, in advisory advice. And on the other, teachers forced to implement an umpteenth change of protocol in the first degree. And even, shot, two changes: while since the same Monday, the primary classes are no longer close to the first case of CVIV-19, to push the systematic screening of schoolchildren (and the eviction of the only cases positive. ), they will rock, as of Wednesday, December 9, of 2 e to a health protocol designed on four levels.

In concrete terms, the “screw tightening” announced by the Government is relative – and insufficient, according to the teachers’ unions: it is essentially limited to the obligation to the port of the outdoor mask (in the courtyard recreation), with new restrictions during sports courses (without contact activities “), as well as the canteen (in relation to the communities).

No change, on the other hand, in colleges and high schools, who feared to rebuild to a “hybrid” teaching. But in primary education, the national education pushes a little further before its strategy: facing the increase in the incidence rate among 6-10 years, which now exceeds 800 cases per 100,000 in a non-age group. vaccinated, she intends to keep schools – and now also the classes – open.

Finish the “one case, a closure”, which prevailed since the return: now, as soon as a first schoolboy is positive detected, each student of the class must be tested. Then, only positive children and those who refuse the test are required to stay at home for a week. It is only in the third case that the class farm – like last year.

“It’s always that took”

This generalization of “reactive” screening, as scientists say, is not quite a surprise: the trial was given on October 7 in ten departments, in a relative discretion. We do not know much at this stage: the results of this experimentation have not been made public – neither by the Ministry of Education, which had neither committed nor by public health France. Interviewed on this subject at the National Assembly on November 30, Jean-Michel Blanquer confined to say that the “experimentation is conclusive”; She “meets some satisfaction from parents and teachers,” he added.

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/Media reports.