Catalunya keeps going back to school on January 10 and Madrid thinks about it

Catalan students they will go back to school after the Christmas break next Monday, January 10, as planned in the school calendar. The Ministry of Education It maintains the date, despite the sixth wave of the pandemic and the impact of the omicron variant, and does not have on the table any extraordinary measure planned in this regard, according to department sources consulted by EL PERIÓDICO.

Before classes ended, on December 22, the ‘conseller’ Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, already ruled out the idea of ​​lengthening the Christmas holidays for schoolchildren to contain the virus. “On the 10th we will open the schools. There is no debate here because the centers are safe places. We are not planning to extend the holidays,” he said emphatically. He then argued that last year, when vaccination was not so widespread, 3,300 school groups were confined “and we kept the schools open.” Well, the idea is to do the same now.

In the Madrid’s community, they are not so emphatic. In a press conference this Tuesday, the general director of Public Health, Elena Andradas, and the Deputy Minister of Health Assistance and Public Health, Antonio Zapatero, have indicated that they are studying the data of covid outbreaks in minors and based on this, “Next week the corresponding measures will be taken.” If Madrid delays going back to school, it would be a change from the intentions expressed before Christmas by the president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who just a week ago defended going back to the classroom normally.

The Catalan Society of Pediatrics it has been against keeping schools closed. They consider that it must be the last resort and that before reaching that extreme, the authorities should decree restrictions in other areas. “Extending the period of return to schools must be the last space to consider in restrictive measures for the epidemiological containment of the pandemic, as recommended by international organizations such as WHO or Unicef,” they say in a statement. They warn of the “little (null) effectiveness” that would delay going back to school after the Christmas holidays “if restrictive measures are not taken beforehand in other areas of social interaction in non-essential activities.”

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As of December 23, in Catalonia there were 4 confined centers out of a total of 5,108 and 291 confined groups of 72,000. This supposes a total of 74,945 confined people; 71,687 were students and the remaining 3,209 were teaching staff.

On the return to the classroom, Educació maintains the security measures in force. That is, a mandatory mask from 6 years of age – it can only be removed outdoors if only the stable coexistence group interacts -, a distance of 1.5 meters between students who are not part of the same stable group, for example in the dining room, hand washing and staggered entrances and exits.