Schools in New York City – the largest school district in the United States, with more than a million students – will not close their doors despite the exponential increase in positive cases of covid-19, but will do massive tests, in the same schools or in homes, as a measure to protect students.
The Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and the Governor of the State, Kathy Hochul, appeared together today to send the same message: that school “is a safe place” and that the experience of distance learning, when schools were closed during confinement, it was “a failed experiment.”
De Blasio and Hochul’s commitment to keep the schools open at the end of the Christmas holidays (which end on January 2) comes when it is known that the omicron variant is taking its toll on children and has caused the number of hospitalizations in minors multiply by four.
“It is true that this variant affects children more,” said Hochul, “but only those who are not vaccinated,” so he recommended parents who still have doubts to go and inoculate their children with the vaccine, available and free for children from 5 years.
Hochul said that schools are going to receive two million tests in the next few days to be carried out within school grounds or at home: if a child tests positive in one school test or another, he explained, his class is not closed, but that is sent to your home.
The quarantine of this child who tests positive will end when one of those home tests is negative and the child no longer has symptoms, while his classmates will continue to attend class, he explained.
For his part, De Blasio said that schools have already received 300,000 “consent forms” from parents who accept that the school perform screening tests on their children, and encouraged those who have not yet done so to sign them.
“Our schools are extraordinarily safe,” the mayor stressed, “and they have to remain open for the mental health of children and for their social needs.”
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