Coronavirus, babel of rules at school. Shock for the return times – Chronicle

A preferred lane for schools, why handle symptomatic cases of COVID-19 it is easier and also with certain uniformity throughout the national territory. To request it, in the Council of Ministers that was held yesterday, the Ministers of Education Lucia azzolina and family Elena Bonetti, who had already spoken out in favor of rapid tests for schools. It’s essentially a matter of time: it’s me ASL prevention departments to go out into the field when someone in the school world feels symptoms that suggest a Sars-Cov2 infection. An eventuality “very guarded and to date very limited”, according to the president of the Higher Institute of Health Silvio Brusaferro that yesterday took stock of the situation: the approximately 2,000 positives found so far -among students, teachers and Ata staff- are a limited number if one considers that the school planet is made up of more than 8 million students and almost 1 million of teachers.

But when the mechanism is activated to fix the pad and then wait for the result, the times are too long and the situations are irregular. There are realities like Florence where the swabbing in ‘drive in’ mode is immediate and the result arrives on time after 48 hours – but, explain those who have already been there, in cases of positivity the wait is even shorter – and others such as Rome where just to do it (direct testimony of several mothers) you have to stand eight hours straight. And you have to wait a week to see the result. Meanwhile, families and classes remain suspended, in voluntary quarantine. Then everyone interprets the protocols however they want, including the decision to quarantine a class or not.

The issue of excessive bureaucracy and the request for clear answers on the possibility of shortening the quarantine to ten days and doing saliva tests at school have seen the Deputy Minister of Health disagree Pierpaolo sileri and the Scientific Technical Committee. To close the question, after Sileri himself reiterated that he had only sought “the answers that people want to have”, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who recalled that the CTS works for free as a government consultant in the management of the pandemic and that from Deputy Minister Cinquestelle there was no desire for controversy.

However, the school’s response to quarantines differs from institution to institution. There is no rule or even a law that establishes how distance lessons should begin. And so it happens that some schools manage to organize themselves well, guaranteeing didactic continuity after a few days, even with video lessons, and others not. Who does it depend on? In theory, according to school unions, a teacher, even in quarantine, can very well teach at a distance but there must be a teaching plan and here each institution, autonomously, does what it wants.