School children face fraught return to class as Omicron runs amok in France
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- 05 Jan 2022
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Teachers had demanded high-quality face masks and quicker “circuit-breaker” class closures to stem the threat of Covid-19 clusters in schools, but Sunday's back-to-school protocol stops short on both counts. Indeed, even as more than 98 percent of France's nearly 6 million 5- to 11-year-olds remain unvaccinated, the new rules treat them not unlike triple-vaccinated adults and virtually do away with class closures.
Before the two-week holiday break – when France paradoxically relaxed the threshold for closing a kindergarten or primary school class from one confirmed infection to three even as it tightened restrictions elsewhere in society – rates of Covid-19 in children and paediatric hospitalisations had hit record highs. Now, after families gathered for the holidays and the Omicron variant staked its claim nationwide, those numbers are even worse despite far lower levels of Covid-19 screening for children over the break.
The latest numbers available show more than one percent of all school-age children testing positive for Covid-19 last week alone in France, with incidence rates above 1,000 per 100,000 over the seven-day period ending December 30. The latest available incidence rates were 1,339 per 100,000 for primary children ages 6 to 10, with more than one in five kids screened in that age group testing positive.
Where Omicron moved in first and fastest – the greater Paris area – child infections are even more rampant, with an incidence rate of 1,869. In the suburban department of Essonne south of Paris, the rate is 2,434 – nearly 2.5 percent of all 6- to 10-year-olds there were infected last week alone.
Clarion calls
Critics have long slammed Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer for hastily dismissing pandemic-mitigating proposals for schools, for fixating on keeping them open instead of making them safe, and accusing him of downplaying coronavirus transmission and virulence in children – with the result being schools that are reliably open but woefully under-equipped to fight Covid-19.
Over the holiday break, medical professionals sounded the alarm over what they see as a chronic lack of Covid-19 preparedness in schools, a situation poised to become exponentially more problematic under Omicron.
In an open letter to Health Minister Olivier Véran on Christmas Day, 50 "very worried" healthcare professionals asked Véran to take over responsibility for the Covid crisis in schools from the education ministry. They appealed for delaying in-person learning in the "high risk" period after the New Year to better equip schools and schoolchildren for the looming Omicron battle, from ventilation to vaccination.
"We are expecting an unprecedented wave in the weeks to come of admissions of children suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), as well as the after-effects related, in some cases, to long-term forms of the illness (paediatric long Covid)," they wrote.
"It is important to do everything to minimise the risks of transmission in all age groups, and particularly in schools," the healthcare professionals added. "The absence of prevention in school settings ultimately impacts healthcare treatment for the whole population since medical time is not infinitely extendible." Read More…
