If a single student falls ill with Covid-19, only the children who were in contact with that student should be quarantined, not the entire class, said Latvian Minister of Education and Science Anita Muižniece.
On Thursday, 3 February, the minister had a meeting with President Egils Levits. During this meeting topics regarding the current testing policy in schools and difficulties related to it were discussed. The minister said the infection rate is not high enough to justify the number of students that have been sent to distance teaching due to their contact person status.
Muižniece also said next week the Operational Management Group and its experts will have developed ways to return children the children who are healthy but forced to undergo distance learning to face-to-face teaching.
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«By reviewing conditions for application of contact person status and making it so that only persons who were in contact with the infected person are considered such and not the entire class, we will be able to reduce the number of necessary tests,» notes Muižniece.
She also said OVG is ordered to find out if other measures are possible to deal with situation when an entire class of students is quarantined after coming into contact with a single Covid-19 patients. As an example she mentioned the practice employed by Belgium, where a class of students is quarantined if 25% of students there become infected.
Minister: if one student gets sick, the entire class should not be quarantined
