According to national procedures, pupils who are Covid-19 contact persons may continue to go to school in person, provided they have no symptoms of disease, and if they have been self-tested for seven consecutive days since contact with the patient.
The self-tests issued by the Riga French Lyceum have been used up, so students who are the contact of Covid-19 must observe the quarantine.
The school's principal, Vineta Rutenberga, said: “To provide the model offered by the Disease Prevention and Control Center that we could test children with self-tests for seven days and not need to quarantine, unfortunately, we cannot provide such an offer. We only have two tests per child per week. We have a situation that many forms are quarantined for this reason."
The government on Tuesday supported the Health Ministry's proposal to purchase additional self-tests because, given the increase in morbidity, the amount is insufficient.
For four weeks more than 8,359,832 self-tests would be needed to provide testing in the education sector.
Minister of Education Anita Muižniece calls for a review of the procedures for setting up quarantine.
“The task for the operational management group is to find out whether another type of condition is possible for the whole class to be quarantined after contact. A good example is the practice applied in Belgium [where all pupils go n quarantine if 25% are infected in one form],” she said.
