The avalanche of school confinements puts families on the ropes: “We are desperate”

The number of students confined in educational centers reported by the Ministry of Education has more than doubled in a week. On January 14, at the end of the first week of class after the Christmas holidays, the ministry reported that there were 102,000 students in quarantine, and this Friday it raised the figure to 262,451. The real number is, however, higher, because that figure corresponds to only 13 communities. And the comparison with what happened seven days before is also only approximate, because although the data from a week ago also referred only to 13 communities, then the information was missing from one of the large autonomies, Madrid, which had not reported them to the ministry, and that this Friday he did.

The confinements of students and teachers – the ministry reported this Friday that there are 24,742 teachers in quarantine in the 13 communities that have reported the data, compared to the 19,335 that were in 14 communities a week ago – advances in any case like a hurricane , just as the experts predicted at Christmas, putting schools and families on the ropes, who have to face confinement with hardly any measures to facilitate conciliation and with educational systems that continue, in most cases, without being prepared to adequately care for children who stay at home. The Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, has stated that it is foreseeable that the drop in the incidence that has begun to be registered this week in the population as a whole will also begin to be reflected in the school “in the coming days”.

The differences in the situation experienced by schools between communities are very high, as is the incidence among the general population. In the 13 autonomies that the Ministry of Education has reported this Friday (the Balearic Islands, Asturias, Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha are missing), confined students represent 3.5% of the total. But in Catalonia, which is one of the territories most affected by the sixth wave and the one that offers the most information daily on the impact of the pandemic in educational centers, the percentage of students in quarantine has skyrocketed to 8.5%.

Wait at the school gate

The situation has reached the point where there are mothers who stay for a while in front of the school these days after dropping off their children. They know that in their class there are, say, four positives, and that if a fifth case has been reported by that time, the group will be confined and they will have to take them home, so they make time in case someone in charge of the center comes out and announces it . That’s what Lucía Carralero did this Thursday, talking for a few minutes with another mother who shared her concern in front of the public school in Valencia where they are taken. The phone call from the management to inform him of the third confinement since the beginning of the class of his son Carlos, 10 years old, finally arrived a few hours later. His daughter, Cecilia, had been confined for the second time on Monday.

The mood of the family is bad. In November, Lucía, her husband and their two children were infected with covid and they were infected consecutively, which meant that the confinement of Cecilia, who is eight years old, and was the last to get sick, lasted a month. “When she found out that they were going to confine her again, she was crying all afternoon,” says the mother. “Children don’t know how to do their homework on the computer by themselves at that age, they don’t take a shower, they don’t eat pizza. And doing your work with them at home is impossible. Since you don’t know if you’ve done enough, at 11 pm you start again. There is no weekend either, because you spend it cleaning what you haven’t had time to clean during the week and helping them finish the homework they haven’t done”.

Lucía especially criticizes that her two children, whose infection was confirmed with a public health PCR at the end of November, are not allowed to go to class, because from the point of view of school protocol they are not considered to have the complete guideline (They would also have to have a dose of vaccine) but they have, instead, the EU digital covid certificate (the covid passport) with which they could go to eat this Saturday at a restaurant or travel abroad.

“Families are desperate and exhausted,” says Mari Carmen Morillas, president of the Giner de los Ríos family federation in Madrid, “the situation is very stressful and there are no measures to reconcile work and family life. It is one of the most complicated moments since the pandemic began. “And we are concerned,” he continues, “because of the emotional bill for our sons and daughters, the public network is saturated and not all families have the financial resources to pay for private psychology sessions.”

The relaxation of school health protocols when closing a classroom is keeping this statistical parameter low (only 0.49% of the total groups were confined this Friday, not counting Asturias and the Balearic Islands, which have not reported the data to the ministry). An autonomous source admitted in this regard this week that the majority of classes in many educational centers in his community would have been forced to remain closed since the restart of classes on January 11 if the health regulations had not been relaxed, increased from one to five the number of positives that determine the confinement of a group.

But this has had the consequence that schools have ceased to be the particularly resistant refuge against the virus that they were in the first part of the pandemic, points out the pediatrician and epidemiologist Quique Bassat. Those under 11 years of age ended the first quarter in December as the third age group with the highest incidence of the virus out of the total of nine in which the Ministry of Health divides the population. During the holidays, they dropped to sixth place. And now, after two weeks of class, they have placed first. In other words, children are infected more during the school period than on vacations, when the opposite happened last year and during the start of the current one. Bassat assures, however, that it is not a very serious problem “because the group of children is the one that presents the least risk when there is transmission.”

Slow childhood vaccination

The cases in schools, continues the epidemiologist, is mainly a consequence of the “galloping incidence” that exists in society, spurred on by the omicron variant. But neither is the rate of childhood vaccination helping, which barely exceeds 50% in Spain as a whole and presents very marked contrasts between communities. While 80.8% of children between the ages of five and 11 have already been vaccinated with one dose in Galicia, the percentage only reaches 29.3% in the Balearic Islands, 36.2% in Catalonia and 42.1% in Madrid .

Lidón Gasull, director of the largest federation of families in Catalonia, Affac, regrets that, almost two years after the start of the pandemic, telematic teaching is not working as it should, “with the impact it has on the right to education and also in the mental health” of minors. And the stress of the parents, he adds, is also being aggravated by the continuous changes in school health protocols in some autonomies, such as his. Laura Baena, president of the group Malasmadres, whose campaign Boys and girls don’t take care of themselves, launched in 2020, has been reactivated on the Change.org platform, it demands, for its part, that the Government recognize the right of parents to “sick leave when your son or daughter is positive or has to be forty, as well as teleworking by legal imperative”.

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