TORONTO – In Ontario schools, Covid is being transmitted at supersonic speed. The number of active cases of the virus associated with the province’s public schools is now higher than it has ever been this year.
The Ministry of Education says that in schools there have been another 320 cases of Covid-19 in a three-day period of which 279 are students. It is the highest weekend total since class resumes and pushes the overall number of active infections associated with Ontario’s public school system to 1,655.
That’s an increase of about 21 percent from this period last week, when schools were linked to 1,357 active infections. The infections, since the beginning of the school year, have broken through 7 thousand: to be precise they are 7,560. The schools where at least one infection has been reported now amount to 749, those currently closed are 12.
This is a situation that raises more and more concerns every day: school-related Covid infections have decreased for most of October, but now they have been steadily increasing for weeks, hand in hand with the growth in the number of cases in the wider community.
Today the news, appeared on the website of the government of the province, that the schools of Ontario with active outbreaks of Covid-19 are 196, 182 of which are elementary. The last time the number of school outbreaks was so high was April 2020, and the Ontario government had just ordered that face-to-face learning be suspended amid a devastating third wave of pandemic.
Meanwhile, Toronto Public Health tweeted that the Toronto schools where the latest outbreaks of the virus broke out, but which currently remain open for face-to-face classes, are McMurrich Je Jackman Avenue public schools and St. Simon, St. Wilfred and Regina Mundi Catholic schools. According to sources who preferred to remain anonymous, Health Canada has ordered that students from five classes of the latter school (from grade 1 to grade 5), stay at home and take classes online.
Contacted by the Corriere, Health Canada did not want to go into detail by statising only, as it always does in these cases, that “an investigation is underway and we are currently in the process of notifying close contacts and asking them to stay at home, monitor symptoms and undergo tests. We are working closely with our school partners to foster a safe environment for our school communities.”
No comment has reached us, until the time of going to press, from Regina Mundi as well as did not answer the questions of the newspaper the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB).
And while in the world of school anxiety and uncertainty increase day by day, among parents in the first place, the government focuses on the vaccination of children to avoid a possible closure of schools.
