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The Minister of Education has never stood out in particularly successful statements, but this relationship that he mentioned must be understood in a relative sense.
Photo: BETAPHOTO / MILOS MISKOVThat is very good in relation to June, July and August, but it would be better if it were less – commented epidemiologist Zoran Radovanović about Minister Mladen Šarčević’s assessment that a good result is that in 16 days of school 20 adults and 52 students got sick with coronavirus. out of a total of 850,000 students.
Šarčević said yesterday that 27 students became ill in Serbian primary schools, that there were 25 positive students in secondary schools, that there were also sick teachers, cleaners and a principal. According to his assessment, school is currently the safest place. The minister stated that 16 primary school students were infected in the capital, and the Belgrade City Public Health Institute told Danas that they had no reported cases of infected secondary school students. Zoran Radovanović agrees with his colleague Predrag Kon’s assessment that it is unlikely that there are no infected students among high school students in Belgrade.
– We entered the school year with about a hundred new discoveries a day in Serbia, which shows that the epidemiological situation was not ideal. One hundred newly discovered means many more actually infected. It is clear that leaving students to school could only increase the frequency of infection, and it certainly happens, the only thing that goes unnoticed by the epidemiological service, because there is not a particularly good control of the disease. So it would be amazing if no high school students in Belgrade were infected, but since they are young, the infection probably occurs without symptoms or with minimal symptoms that they do not pay attention to, says Radovanović for Danas.
Jasna Janković, president of the Serbian Education Workers’ Union, tells Danas that she cannot say that the total number of patients in schools is a good or bad result. If you look at the total number of students, it seems to her that the result is good, but on the other hand, it indicates that the big question is how many infected cases have been reported. Janković cites an example from a primary school in Čačak, where a teacher, after receiving a positive result for the corona virus, translated the whole class into online learning. Jankovic asks how her students are counted. The fact that there is not a single sick high school student in Belgrade does not seem realistic either.
– Such an environment has been created that the school principal is responsible for every infection with the corona virus, which means that the principals will not report anything until the last moment because they will be considered incompetent. Because of such an atmosphere, he’s somehow undercover, Janković thinks.
He points out that an increase in the number of infected people can be expected in the next period, not only due to the return of tourists, but also due to the immigration of students to student residences and the beginning of the semester in higher education institutions. October 1st. Commenting on the fact that the student dormitories were ordered to empty 50 percent of their capacity, and such a restriction does not apply to the student dormitories, Radovanović says that it is clear what this is about:
– The government once tried to touch the students, resulting in massive demonstrations. They received a message that the student population should not be touched, and then secondary school students are harassed – notes Radovanović, who appreciates the decision that up to 50% of users can stay in dormitories at the same time as irresponsible and inhumane.
As for the small number of infected teachers, Danas’ interlocutor recalls that school employees are required to wear masks all the time, but that there is also the possibility of further infection. When asked what the inflection point should be for making a decision about school closings and the switch to online learning, Radovanovic replied that there is no fixed and universal number, and that in some Western countries the criterion is 30 % of those infected.
It all depends on the Ministry
The problem is that everything is centralized in our country, everything depends on the Ministry. It would be much better if schools had more freedom to organize classes according to their particularities and if measures were related to local circumstances, that is, if measures were applied according to the local epidemiological situation. It would be necessary for the crisis personnel to report every day how many newcomers there are in each Serbian city, they have that information, but for certain reasons they are hiding it – says Radovanović.
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