STA, 7 September 2020 - As the second week of school has started with a number of groups of children in quarantine due to coronavirus cases detected among classmates, the Education Ministry has announced it is developing an application which will contain all relevant information in one place.
The list of groups of primary and secondary pupils in quarantine is changing on a daily basis, and the ministry said on Monday it would start publishing data on a weekly basis on Friday.
The information about quarantine orders in relation to educational establishments are currently made public in a disorganised fashion, and there are no precise data yet.
For this reason, the ministry also announced that detailed insight in the number of infected children who attend kindergartens and primary and secondary schools would be enabled with an application containing all relevant data.
So far, several classes of children as well as teachers have been quarantined due to infections in kindergartens, primary and secondary schools around Slovenia as the new school year started on 1 September.
The ministry said quarantine for individual classes had been ordered in 13 out of the 497 Slovenian primary schools, and that 150 children out of the total of 191,726 were in isolation.
"The data show that the current situation is fully manageable," the ministry said, adding that schools and kindergartens were well prepared for the epidemiological situation and that the system was responsive.
Doctors have meanwhile also had the problem of how to differentiate between the symptoms of Covid-19 and other seasonal infections in school children, and whether every child with flu-like symptoms should be tested.
Paediatricians have already called for new guidelines for testing of small children, with Denis Baš telling the STA that experts and representatives of the Health Ministry would discuss it on Thursday.
Baš said that his clinic had been very busy with a lot of sick children, and that it was difficult to secure a Covid-19 testing spot. Paediatricians thus fear that the system would not be able to test such a large number of children.
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