In schools, entire parallels go into quarantine. Teachers get sick, students get sick. A surge in children's incidence of covid has been recorded in Moscow, and planned hospitalizations in children's hospitals have been cancelled. On January 26, the Moscow Mayor's Office announced that schools can independently decide on the introduction of quarantine.
Photo: RIA Novosti
Doctors say that the reason may not be the special vulnerability of children to a new strain of coronavirus, but its special volatility compared to previous ones — and the fact that children, unlike adults, are generally not vaccinated, and only a few have been ill with previous ones. strains.
School chats in recent days are read like military reports: 6th grade passed, 8th grade passed, difficult situation in 7th and 9th grades …
Teachers they are also out of order, there is no one to replace them.
In our school chat after an exchange of news in the spirit: “I got sick, I need a replacement for the 5th-6th lesson tomorrow”; “and I got sick, I need a replacement for the 3rd-4th lesson”; “I understand that everyone is sick, but we need two more people to diagnose,” the mathematician finally laid out the expected. “Dear mother,” he began. “Looks like our family has come to an end. Bosse and Betan are sick with some kind of mud and they were taken to the hospital, and they isolated me, it doesn’t hurt at all, but of course I will get sick with this mud, I can only talk with Carlson, but I try to talk less because you will be worried and you need peace, says the housekeeper she Carlson is not sick either, but they will soon get sick.”
They are not sick, but they will soon get sick too.
“Children get sick,” writes a teacher from Kurgan. — 11th grade — out of 38 students, 13 people are really sick (that is, they turned to the clinic and stay at home), 4 more have a temperature at home, but without a certificate, they have covid. Half of them are in three 10th grades — they get sick, there are covid ones.
“8th grade. 8 out of 28 people go. They don’t do quarantine yet, they write some terrible diagnostics, ”says the mother of a Moscow eighth-grader. Diagnostic work in Moscow schools really goes non-stop and does not stop for the sake of quarantine.
“Of the three classes where I teach, two have gone into quarantine; I taught three lessons online and one in person. It is very inconvenient to go to school for one lesson: it seems to be pointless,” says a teacher from Moscow. — She arrived. Three people came to the lesson, the rest are sick. Indeed, it's pointless. But as of today, this class has also been quarantined.”
Until January 26, classes and schools went into quarantine by order of Rospotrebnadzor. The reasons were clear: one officially sick with covid or 20% of patients with acute respiratory infections and acute respiratory viral infections. At the same time, those classes in which there were no formal grounds for quarantine continued to study full-time — even if more than half of the children in the class are sick, but parents prefer not to go to the doctor and not take a certificate.
Now the decision to send a class to quarantine or keep it in full-time education can be made by the school itself in agreement with the parents.
However, even in those classes where more than half of the children on the payroll are ill, there are not so many officially diagnosed children.
Firstly, tests can be unreliable (both doctors and patients say that with obvious Omicron symptoms, both the rapid test and PCR often turn out to be negative).
Secondly, families are not particularly eager to do tests in cases where the child suffers from the disease easily, so that the whole family is not put on social monitoring hated by everyone. The mother of two Moscow schoolchildren says: “Today the eldest has 8 people out of 29 in her class, the rest are sick (she too). There is no distance, because no one takes tests, I don’t want to sit at home for 2 weeks in the 11th grade. Everyone gets sick easily.» It should be noted, however, that for those who did not get sick themselves, but only had contact with the coronavirus, quarantine was reduced from January 25 by the decision of Rospotrebnadzor from 14 to 7 days.
Thirdly, even if the test was done at home and it is positive, the child is not given an official certificate, because children's clinics are overloaded and cannot cope with the flow of visitors. The idea of automatic issuance of a certificate or sick leave with a positive analysis for covid in the Moscow Department of Health, as well as in the Ministry of Health, has not yet been reached.
It is very likely that both in the country and in Moscow, the authorities do not want such an outbreak of parental discontent as last year. A SuperJob portal survey conducted after the New Year holidays showed that 58% of parents would not approve of the new introduction of distance learning in Moscow in the event of a high level of covid incidence.
Only 24% would support this idea. Moreover, fathers agree to distance learning in 29% of cases, and mothers only in 18%.
Among parents, especially radical ones, the idea is still popular that covid is supposedly just a beautiful name for seasonal acute respiratory infections and SARS
(after all, children get sick easily), and that he , covid, was specifically designed to transfer children to a distance learning format that is harmful to their health and development. And, of course, in order to introduce the Sputnik vaccine: on January 24, the Ministry of Health approved its clinical trials on children.