Parents against offline classes amid spike in Covid cases

Hyderabad, Jan 08: Amid the rise in Covid-19 cases, more and more Indian parents are unwilling to send their children to schools.

A recent survey by LocalCircles revealed that 52 per cent of parents do not want to send children to schools due to rising Covid-19 cases in their districts or cities.

While many parents are concerned about the lower effectiveness of online education and some others about the loss of education due to no online facilities, the biggest issue according to parents with in-person school at this time is poor air ventilation in classrooms and lack of social distancing.

The Omicron variant, found to be 3-5X more transmissible than the previous variants, poses the risk of fast spread among children and from them to other members of the family.

On the other hand, 18 per cent of those surveyed said that they are “already sending children to school and will continue despite Omicron” whereas 25 per cent said they will send their children “whenever the schools reopen.”

Founder of LocalCircles Sachin Taparia said: “we as a country are going into a very critical period and the risk of a large number of children getting infected with Omicron leading to more infections in their families is very high. Unless a district or city is Covid free or has really low levels of TPR, our recommendation to the Central Government and State Governments would be to switch to online education and enable the same via mediums like internet, television, radio, etc. for rural locations at least till the end of February.”

Due to the rapid surge of new cases in the country, several cities and states have already announced the closure of schools.

While schools remain closed in Mumbai, schools in other parts of Maharashtra continue to function in person. Some states have closed schools only for primary classes. Andhra Pradesh also continues to keep in-person schools open despite 20 people in a government school testing positive.

In Gujarat, 10 schools have been directed to close with 150 students found positive in the last two weeks. While Haryana and Punjab have announced the closure of schools, Chandigarh continues to operate schools offline.

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