Last month, during this Pandemic our country hit the global record of daily Covid cases with over 4 lakh infections. The deadly second wave of Covid-19 has risked many lives and therefore with concern to the health and safety of students schools were closed and even the board exams for Class 10th and Class 12th were scrapped. Many states had imposed lockdown rules to deal with the situation.
Now, from the past few weeks India is witnessing the drop in new Covid cases. People are getting vaccinated to avoid Covid infection, the majority are above 45 years old. As conditions are slowly getting better is it good to reopen School and resume classes for the students?
According to the experts there is still the dread of the third wave of coronavirus and the sources state that the third wave is most likely to hit in the next 2 months. Most of the young population is yet to get vaccinated. The government says, studies indicate that the need for hospitalization will reduce by 70-80 percent if a person is vaccinated.
At this point of time it is still a risky task to reopen the schools like earlier. As of now a certain percentage of children are already infected with the virus and few got cured after the treatment. However on resuming offline education there is a chance for a spike in fresh cases.
While many states are preparing for the third wave, setting up vaccination drives is challenging.
At the Health Ministry’s briefing, Dr.VK Paul associated with NITI Aayog presented his opinion about reopening of schools. He said that a lot of things are to be considered before deciding to reopen the schools. He also mentioned that the government will consider reopening schools only when the majority of teachers and staff get vaccinated.
“The time should come soon. But we must also consider how schools were reopened in foreign countries and they had to close after the outbreak was reported. We don’t want to put our children and teachers in such a situation unless we have more confidence that the pandemic won’t harm us”. He added.
Currently the views on reopening schools nation-wide is being taken from the states and union territories. As per the reports, final decision of reopening schools will be taken after reviewing the conditions completely. Few states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, etc might reopen educational institutions after June 30th.
Schools and colleges in various cities have started the admission process already. The urge to reopen schools and colleges is to speed up the process of admission and pending activities related to education and others. Therefore the decision has to be made after looking into all the aspects of safety and security.
