The government has relaxed the health protocol for students, faced with the difficulty of obtaining self-tests. Students will not have to repeat the course of the three tests if a new positive Covid case appears within seven days.
Last Monday, January 3, a new health protocol in schools came into force in an attempt to curb the dynamics of the Covid-19 epidemic and the Omicron wave. This applies to children under 12 years old. Before, if a positive Covid case was detected in a class, the other students had to be tested three times instead of just one. That is to say on D + 0 where a negative test allowed them to return to their establishment then on D + 2 and D + 4.
But this protocol will hardly have had time to see the light of day and to be tested for 3 days when it was relaxed by the government. The Ministry of National Education announced it Thursday evening January 6. This protocol made certain situations more complex and resulted in many absences from classes. But what are the changes of this new protocol?
What are the changes?
Students will no longer have to start the course of the three screening tests again if a new positive case of Covid-19 appears in their class within less than seven days.
- If a student in the class is negative one day, then positive on D + 2 or D + 4, it will not be necessary to restart a screening cycle of three tests for the other students. The student screening route will remain valid for seven days.
One condition is nevertheless required: this positive case must be identified within seven days.
If a student who tests negative is finally declared positive (during his first or second self-test), the other students in his class will not have to repeat their cycle of three tests. Note that this famous journey must start again in one case: if the second contaminated student has had contact with classmates within this seven-day period. Thus, there is no more class closure as soon as we reach three cases of Covid, but only “depending on the situation” and “in the presence of a very large number of cases”, Announced the National Education.
The new procedure for covid screening
It is also specified that if the student is a contact case of a confirmed case within his family sphere, a quarantine of seven days from the occurrence of the case must be respected, and a PCR or antigen test carried out, at the time of the case. ‘after this quarantine, unless the student is under 12 years of age or has a full vaccination schedule. In the latter case, the student must immediately perform a PCR or antigen test, then self-tests on D + 2 and D + 4, in order to continue learning if the results turn out to be negative.
According to Guislaine David, “we will inevitably have children who will be positive on D + 5 or D + 6 and we will have cases which will become even more contaminated“, she worried. Indeed, there is already 47,453 positive students since the start of the school year and 9,202 classes closed, according to the Ministry of National Education. “We understand the question of the availability of self-tests and the difficulty of testing children. We are bound to have positive cases. This is why in order to resolve all these problems, this gas plant, we ask to isolate the contact cases when we have a positive case in the class, we close the class for 7 days, which means that the students in this class are protected for 7 days“, explained the co-secretary general and spokesperson for the SNUipp-FSU union.