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“It is a softer way so that we can return to face-to-face teaching,” he emphasized. He also trusts that teachers will approach this with sensitivity and experience.
Regulation should not be implemented by bending and breaking, Fassmann said. After all, school is not an operating room. Especially if there is ventilation or if a student wearing the mask is not getting good air, this can also be removed. In principle, however, the mask requirement is a relatively mild means of slowing down the number of infections, he pointed to the importance of aerosols in the transmission of Sars-CoV-2.
He receives emails, sometimes mass and serial emails, from parents who strictly reject the requirement to wear a mask in class, but without saying how they would envision safe daily school life in times of a pandemic, Fassmann said. It seems like an underestimation of the health risk posed by the corona virus. More recently, parents’ associations had also campaigned against the requirement to wear a mask during classes and called for alternatives such as the use of ventilation devices or protective Plexiglas walls so that young people can remove the mask at least when seated.
In a letter to education directorates, the education ministry has already given schools instructions on what to do if parents threaten criminal charges or lawsuits for official responsibility because of the mask requirement: schools should pass the matter on to the directions of education. These in turn want to refer to a pending decision of the Constitutional Court on oral and nasal protection in schools, which remains to be seen.
According to Faßmann, 72 percent of school and kindergarten employees participate in massive special tests for this occupational group in six federal states over the weekend. According to the antigen test, 0.24 percent or about 300 people were infected with the coronavirus. At the moment, there are no figures for Vienna, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, where kindergarten teachers and teachers participated in the massive general tests.
For him, the high level of participation is proof of educators’ strong sense of responsibility, Faßmann said happily. “That is more than a respectable value, you could also say that it is a great value.”
According to Faßmann, the proportion of teachers in all federal states will only be known when Vienna has finished its massive test, which will last until December 13. Even if you take into account the current restricted influx in Vienna, it is at two-thirds. Faßmann assumes an equally high value for Tyrol as in the other federal states.
The proportion of positives among those tested is 0.24 percent, well below the value of the last study of unreported figures from November at 3.1 percent. Now that the positive results have not yet been confirmed by PCR testing, this value should drop further. According to Faßmann, these low infection rates could be due to the fact that those who are health conscious anyway and who adhere to the rules tend to participate in a voluntary test. Furthermore, the study of the unreported number was carried out at the height of the second wave, while the massive teacher tests were carried out at the end of the second hard lock, which had already pushed down the unreported number.
Targeting social groups specifically has been shown to increase acceptance of mass testing, Faßmann emphasized. Young people who are currently barely participating in mass testing need to be addressed more specifically in the next wave of testing and make it clear to them what testing will bring them in real life.
When asked by students about more tests, Faßmann referred to his large number of 1.1 million. Also, some testing methods cannot be expected of younger students from a parent’s point of view. “We still have to reflect on that, we still have a little time here and we will communicate it in due course.” New testing procedures are constantly appearing on the market.
From Faßmann’s point of view, mass tests are in any case a good instrument to remove infected people from the system without symptoms. Testing is important to normal school operations and there will certainly be more testing in January. Whether it will be a mass test or a dedicated decentralized test has yet to be decided. “But testing will become the norm for a virus resistant school.” Additionally, there are now mobile testers in schools in eight federal states that are supposed to quickly clear up suspected cases in schools using rapid antigen tests.
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