Stubborn virus prolongs virtual elementary school
Southern Ontario elementary students will not head back into school buildings on Jan. 11 as planned because of an alarming rise in COVID-19 cases, says the province's chief medical officer of health.
The temporary shift to remote learning at home that began this week will continue for another two weeks for those students, Dr. David Williams announced on Thursday.
There was no change to plans for secondary students in southern Ontario, which includes Ottawa.
They were already slated to learn remotely at home until Jan. 25. In northern Ontario, in-person schooling can resume for all students on Jan. 11 as planned.
Williams said the number of cases of COVID-19 is rising and community transmission of the virus is high.
He cited people who held gatherings, failed to wear masks or physically distance as a big factor and urged people to follow public health advice.
With children at home for several weeks for the holidays, the percentage of them testing positive has risen sharply, the government said in a news release. Most troubling was that children 12 and 13 years old, whose test positivity rates were 5.4 per cent in late November and early December, rose to nearly 20 per cent in January, it said.
Williams emphasized that the government doesn't want to close schools for the year. In-school classes simply will be “deferred.”
“We want the schools open and we want them to stay open.”
While schools are closed, the province will work to improve the layers of protection inside, Williams said. That could include better testing and surveillance testing, he said.
The province has already said it plans to ramp up testing of asymptomatic students and staff. That would detect cases among people who have COVID-19 but no symptoms and help control school outbreaks. Details of that plan have not been announced.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce will make further announcements soon, Williams said.
Some doctors, epidemiologists and education unions had been urging the province to consider extending virtual schooling given the growing threat posed by the virus.
On Thursday, Ontario reported a record number of new cases and deaths due to COVID-19.
The decision to extend remote schooling means that working parents of elementary schoolchildren again will be scrambling to find childcare. That includes teachers, who are expected to offer real-time virtual lessons for 75 per cent of the instructional day.
Daycares are allowed to operate but cannot accept school-age children.
Emergency childcare is being provided for essential front-line health and safety workers.
The situation evolved quickly. Last week Lecce said the government was determined to reopen schools since in-person learning is vital for children's emotional and academic well-being.
But in the past several days, even experts who have promoted the importance of open schools warned about the dangers presented by the surge in the virus.
Amy Greer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the University of Guelph, said on social media that keeping schools closed is heartbreaking, but allowing children to go back on Jan. 11 would be “reckless and dangerous.”
In Windsor, where the virus is raging, the local medical officer of health had said he would order schools closed if the province did not.
Before schools closed on Dec. 18 for the holidays, Williams said the measures taken to protect them from COVID-19 had worked. A lot of cases arose but outbreaks were kept to a “limited amount” and there was “hardly any” transmission of the virus at schools, he said.
The level of COVID-19 in the community is the major determinant of how many cases pop up in schools, experts agree. There is no consensus among experts, however, on the question of what role schools play in driving transmission rates in the community.
When schools reopened in September, the province had about 200 to 300 COVID-19 cases a day. Now there are more than 3,000 a day, and Williams said he was concerned it could jump to 4,000 a day.
In Ontario, as of Dec. 22, a total of 7,292 students or school staff had lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19. At that time, 20 per cent of the province's 4,828 schools had an active case.
In Ottawa, there were 86 active cases of COVID-19 at schools as of Dec. 18.