EDITORIAL - Back to school, in person

For the first time in over two years, millions of children are set to return to classrooms today for the start of full face-to-face education in public schools. This will have to be delayed, however, in many areas badly hit by Severe Tropical Storm Paeng. Private schools, upon their request, have also been granted the option to continue hybrid education, allowing them to maintain physical distancing in their classrooms.

In-person classes are resuming 100 percent even as the COVID virus continues to mutate, producing strains that are so evasive to both natural and vaccine immunity they might as well be entirely new pathogens. Pandemic fatigue, however, has set in, and there are many who are willing to risk infection to resume life as they knew it before COVID-19 entered the country.

COVID infections were recorded among students, educators and school personnel as partial face-to-face classes resumed with the opening of the current academic year. Health experts have generally cautioned against the full resumption of in-person classes, especially with the slowdown in the uptake of vaccines and boosters. But consultations with stakeholders resulted in the decision to forge ahead with full face-to-face education.

What must be done now is to ensure that the health experts’ worst fears do not materialize, especially with the lifting of indoor mask mandates that will also be implemented in public schools. The partial implementation of face-to-face classes showed what must be done to reduce infection risks: masking, proper ventilation, temperature checks, and the provision of alcohol dispensers and hand washing stations with soap and clean water.

Many school children especially in low-income households live in cramped dwellings, often together with multiple generations of relatives from babies to great-grandparents. These are sectors vulnerable to critical COVID infection and must continue to be protected from a disease that has killed 64,074 people in the Philippines as of the end of October.

Local government units need to ramp up efforts to improve vaccine uptake especially among the vulnerable sectors. This is not only to protect their constituents from infection but also to prevent precious vaccines from going to waste. The private sector, which saw P5 billion of the vaccines that it procured go to the trash bin, has lost appetite for augmenting government resources for further procurements.

Sufficient public transport must be available, and school children must be protected from the usual threats to their personal safety such as petty thieves, molesters and drug pushers.

A full reopening of classes will give the economy a much-needed boost after two years of lockdowns. All stakeholders must ensure that the move will not lead instead to a return to restrictions because of a renewed COVID surge.