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Mainland Portugal has, on Wednesday, 23 active outbreaks in educational institutions. The general director of Health assured, in a press conference, that the “situation is under control” since the schools reopened. According to Graça Freitas, there are “few outbreaks and few cases”, although it is still “early” to assess the real impact of going back to school on the epidemiological evolution of the country.
These outbreaks correspond to a total of 136 infections by the new coronavirus among students and staff (teachers and non-teachers) and they affect the entire teaching universe: kindergartens, primary, basic, secondary schools and universities.
Most of the active transmission chains are in Lisbon and the Tagus Valley (12). It is followed by the north (with seven foci), the center (three) and the Algarve (one). In Alentejo, there is no record of an outbreak in a school.
Regarding the impact of these cases on the epidemiological situation of the country, the head of DGS says that it is still early for this type of evaluation. However, the information provided by epidemiological public health surveys suggests that contagion occurs more often within families and is transported to school than vice versa. “Often there are sick relatives and it seems that the transmission passed more from the family to the children than vice versa. On other occasions, the positive cases are in employees who come from the community and will have contracted the infection in the community,” said Graça Freitas.
In general, the detection of a positive case does not disturb the functioning of the school, only one class, but this always depends on the evaluation of each educational institution with the health authorities. “The decision to go home only one class is related to the organization of the school. The more organized by bubbles, by sectors, by classes the school is, the easier it will be to keep the students in school and send the least number of people to home surveillance “, explains the general director of Health, who also took the opportunity to call on the school community to “secrete as much as possible, without letting people stop living together.”
The return to face-to-face classes occurred in the week of September 14 to 17, which corresponds to the start of the 2020-21 school year, after this type of teaching was suspended on March 17 due to the covid-19 pandemic . One of the main objectives is that face-to-face teaching can be maintained in as many situations as possible, that is, that schools continue to function, even when they are infected and there is a need to isolate a class, for example.
In Portugal, in the last 24 hours, eight more people died from covid-19 and 944 more cases of infection were confirmed. According to the epidemiological bulletin of the General Directorate of Health (DGS) this Wednesday (October 7), in total, since the pandemic began, 81256 infected, 51,037 recovered (more 325) and 2,040 victims have been registered. mortals in the field.
