Anticipating a third Covid-19 wave in October, the Government on Tuesday said that schools, shut since March last year due to the pandemic, will re-open only after a significant portion of the population has been vaccinated against coronavirus.
The Government had last week also cancelled CBSE and ICSE exams for Class 10 and 12. An alternative marking system has been proposed, amended with suggestions from parents and students, and accepted by the Supreme Court.
“Schools require teachers and children to sit together. It gives the virus an opportunity to spread. We can only have this (re-opening of schools) when a large part of the population is protected,” Dr VK Paul, Member (Health), NITI Aayog, said at a press conference on Tuesday here.
“Until it (the spread of the virus) is predictable it is hard to re-open,” he said.
Dr Paul also warned against re-opening schools because of the declining trend in daily new cases, saying: “The lull right now is because of restrictions. When they are removed cases may spike.”
The re-opening of schools, colleges and other places of education will “always be under active consideration... but the overall guidance is to be cautious”, he added.
Some states like Telangana have said they will re-open schools and colleges from July 1. Others, like Delhi and Kerala, have said they will continue with virtual classes for now.
“We should also remember that in many countries schools reopened then outbreaks were reported and they had to shut them down again. We don’t want to put our children and teachers in that situation unless we have more confidence that the pandemic won’t harm us,” the government has been saying in the past few days.
The government has said next month’s sero survey will include 14,000 kids over the age of six.
In a recently released sero-survey by the AIIMS, the seroprevalence, presence of virus-fighting antibodies against Sars-CoV-2, among children was found to be 55.7% across five study sites, in comparison to 63.5% among adults.
Last month, over 8,000 children and teenagers were found to be tested positive for Covid-19 in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar, accounting for about 10 per cent of cases in the district.
Children below 18 have not yet been cleared to receive a Covid vaccine, although Bharat Biotech has begun trials for 2-18 year old candidates with Covaxin.