Potential Petri dishes

Wednesday 12th August, 2020

Schools have reopened at last, and attendance is reportedly improving. What with the threat of a second wave of COVID-19, all precautions have been taken to ensure the safety of students, we are told. Media reports say facilities have been provided for hand-washing, and temperature tests are being conducted. Schools cannot remain closed indefinitely. The Education Ministry was finally left with no alternative but to reopen them. However, we have to tread extremely cautiously, learning from the experiences of other countries which reopened schools before us.

The possibility of the school system becoming a Petri dish for coronavirus cannot be ruled out, as a New York Times (NYT) report on Israel’s experiment with school reopening points out. Confident that the pandemic had been brought under control, and there was no threat of a second wave of infections, Israel reopened all schools, in May, adopting preventive measures. A few days later, infections began to occur in ones and two, in schools, and then increased exponentially before rippling out to students’ homes and neighbourhoods, forcing schools to close.

What has been Israel’s advice to other nations as regards school reopening? Eli Waxman, a professor of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Chairman of the team advising Israel’s National Security Council on the pandemic, has been quoted by NYT as saying: “They [other nations] definitely should not do what we have done … it was a major failure.” These words should be heeded.

Sri Lankan schools, including the so-called popular ones, are characterised by serious space constraints. There are as many as 50 students to a class in most schools which are bursting at the seams with hardly any room for physical distancing. The education authorities, here, have sought to overcome the problem of congestion by allowing students in some grades to attend school only a few days a week, but the feasibility of such ad hoc measures is in question. As it stands, we may not have a silver bullet to neutralise the coronavius threat in the foreseeable future, but schools will have to be fully functional; they have to be provided with necessary facilities. Many schools also lack proper sanitary facilities, and this problem will stand in the way of the Education Ministry’s plans to ensure the safety of students vis-a-vis COVID-19 as well as other infectious diseases.

We live in a country where even adults do not follow the health guidelines in place to prevent COVID-19, and children cannot be expected to adhere to them to the letter. Common practices such as sharing food and drinks and exchanging books can expose students to infections. Children are gregarious and no amount of advice or warning will prevent them from playing together or make them avoid physical contact.

Transport is another issue that should be factored in. Most students travel in school buses/vans or use public transport. School vehicles are overcrowded. These contraptions sans proper ventilation pose health risks to students even when there are no contagions around. The same goes for buses and trains. Initially, they transported passengers in keeping with the health guidelines, but now they are chock-full so much so that a single Covid-19 patient among commuters can cause an explosive spread of the virus, making contact tracing impossible.

The pandemic situation may seem to be under control, here, but we must not lower our guard under any circumstances. New Zealand, which was thought to have beaten coronavirus decisively, has recorded the first community transmission of COVID-19 in 102 days; four cases have been detected in a single family in Auckland, and a lockdown has been imposed to curb the spread of the disease. This shows how elusive the virus can be. The possibility of a similar situation arising here cannot be ruled out. The need for aggressive testing, especially among those in the high risk groups such as children, cannot be overemphasised. It is imperative that PCR tests are conducted in schools regularly.