Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@gau­r­dian.co.tt

Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry Schools Prin­ci­pals’ As­so­ci­a­tion (NAPSPA) head Lance Mot­ley is ad­vis­ing par­ents to keep their chil­dren at home once a mem­ber of the house­hold is ill.

His call came on Sun­day fol­low­ing the re­cent de­tec­tion of a Stan­dard 5 Mar­aval RC school pupil who con­tract­ed COVID-19 from a rel­a­tive un­know­ing­ly and at­tend­ed school for three days be­fore it was de­tect­ed.

The gen­er­al ad­vice for cit­i­zens is to stay home if ill and seek med­ical at­ten­tion to rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of COVID-19 but Mot­t­ley said yes­ter­day it needs to be ex­pand­ed.

“As part of our pro­to­cols, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion would have been in­sist­ing to par­ents through schools that if the child is dis­play­ing some flu-like symp­toms it is the onus, the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of the par­ents to keep that child home. Now we want to add some­thing to that be­cause clear­ly, the child did not dis­play any symp­toms at all...so we want to go a step for­ward and say if any­one in the home is dis­play­ing flu-like symp­toms, keep the child home,” Mot­t­ley said in a tele­phone in­ter­view.

“My un­der­stand­ing is the school (Mar­aval RC) has ther­mal test­ing go­ing on, sani­ti­sa­tion at the en­trance, the chil­dren are re­quired to wear masks...all schools are asked to do that. Notwith­stand­ing that, they were not able to pick up whether the child was symp­to­matic of not.”

COVID cas­es 139, 141 and 142 are cur­rent­ly at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal re­ceiv­ing treat­ment. How­ev­er, five pri­ma­ry con­tacts of case 142, a 63-year-old Mar­aval woman, test­ed pos­i­tive for the virus. The coun­try’s five lat­est cas­es, three of them chil­dren, came from that woman’s house­hold. Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said the child in the Mar­aval RC SEA class pos­si­bly ex­posed 76 oth­er pupils and 12 school of­fi­cials to the virus.

Aris­ing out of this, he said, over 200 sec­ondary con­tacts, which in­clude the oth­er stu­dents, their par­ents, sib­lings and so­cial con­tacts, were al­so be­ing probed.

The school’s stu­dents and teach­ers, who were out for the Au­gust 20 SEA ex­am prepa­ra­tions, are now in self-quar­an­tine as a re­sult of the in­ci­dent, which now rais­es ques­tions about if the stu­dents will be able to ad­e­quate­ly pre­pare for the SEA ex­am.

“It still hangs in the bal­ance,” Mot­t­ley said, not­ed he was un­sure about the school’s next step and that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion would have to pro­vide guid­ance on the mat­ter.

He not­ed that all eyes will now be trained on the Min­istry of Health’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the source of and spread of the in­fec­tion to cas­es 139, 141 and 142, which have been la­belled as lo­cal­ly trans­mit­ted and are pend­ing fur­ther “epi­demi­o­log­i­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”

How­ev­er, he en­cour­aged par­ents to “con­tin­ue to send your chil­dren out un­til fur­ther ad­vice from the Min­istry of Health.”

“This is on­ly one case, so far, that we know about and we are hop­ing that this is on­ly in this par­tic­u­lar in­stance and it is not far and it’s not wide-spread,” Mot­t­ley said.

He called on the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to “mount a pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign to sen­si­tise our par­ents on what is ex­pect­ed of them...as it re­lates to send­ing their chil­dren to school and ob­serv­ing the COVID-19 pro­to­cols.”