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All students and staff at a school in Co Kerry must be screened for Covid-19 and all children will be asked to stay home until December 30 after 17 confirmed cases.
According to a letter to HSE South parents, 17 cases have so far been reported in Scoil Mhuire Killorglin, a coeducational primary school of 386 students, “and contact tracing is ongoing.”
“In the Irish experience with Covid-19 so far, it has been rare to see an outbreak of this scale among the school population,” the letter says.
The school management had implemented and continued to implement the appropriate Covid control measures. And the cases and close contacts have been isolated.
“After a more in-depth review today, based on current evidence, the decision was made to extend testing to the rest of the school population (children and staff),” the letter says.
“Any child who has not previously been identified as a case or a close contact is now advised to restrict their movements until Wednesday, December 30,” the letter warns. The children are being referred for two tests, several days apart, by the HSE.
62 cases of Covid-19 were detected in schools last week after mass testing of more than 1,700 students and staff in just over 100 schools, new figures show.
The positivity rate in schools has also increased from 2.5% to 3.5% in the space of one week.
This rate is now slightly higher than when schools closed for the midterm break in late October.
The figures are contained in HSE’s weekly Covid-19 Mass Testing Report for Schools and Child Care Centers Dec. 6-12.
This latest weekly report shows that 1,774 close school contacts of positive cases were tested in a total of 105 schools last week.
Following massive testing of these close contacts, a total of 62 positive cases were detected.
Of these, the majority were at the primary level (49), followed by the second level (12) and in special education (1).
The positivity rates were highest at the primary level (3.6 percent), followed by the second level (3.4 percent) and special education (1.6 percent).
When broken down by age, the vast majority (87 percent) of cases occurred in children, while the remainder occurred in those over 18 years of age.
Co Mayo School
The cases in the report include many of the 16 cases detected at the Claremorris Boys National School in Co Mayo.
The school made headlines last week when the school’s principal announced that it would be closing for safety reasons.
However, it was ordered to reopen on Monday this week by the Department of Education on the grounds that public health authorities had not recommended its closure.
The decision has sparked a debate about whether school boards should be able to close schools if they feel the environment is no longer safe.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin told Dáil on Wednesday that it was right for these decisions to be made by public health experts rather than the schools themselves.
The HSE weekly report also provides a breakdown of the figures for the year to date.
They show that second-level schools have the lowest positivity rates (1.9%), followed by primary schools (2.6%) and special schools (3.1%). Daycare centers have the highest positivity rates (3.8 percent).
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