Stu­dents in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools across T&T fi­nal­ly got the op­por­tu­ni­ty to set­tle in­to their class­rooms for the new aca­d­e­m­ic year yes­ter­day, af­ter teach­ers re­sumed du­ties fol­low­ing Mon­day’s of­fi­cial day of rest and re­flec­tion.

More im­por­tan­ty, it marked the first time since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic struck in 2020 that stu­dents across the board—in­clud­ing ter­tiary lev­el—were back in class­rooms for in-per­son class­es in over two years.

This is pos­si­ble with the Min­istry of Health’s eas­ing of the re­stric­tions which had pre­vi­ous­ly seen schools and ter­tiary lev­el in­sti­tu­tions across the coun­try shut down for al­most a full two years be­cause in-per­son ac­tiv­i­ty was deemed too risky to un­der­take giv­en the lev­els of in­fec­tions and deaths at the pan­dem­ic’s height.

Crit­i­cal­ly at this junc­ture, how­ev­er, is the fact that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion has al­so re­laxed mask wear­ing at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school lev­els. As it stands now, wear­ing masks is not manda­to­ry. How­ev­er, Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly has urged par­ents/guardians to use their dis­cre­tion and err on the side of safe­ty in this mat­ter, since it is clear the dis­ease is still very ac­tive with­in the coun­try and as dead­ly as ever.

In fact, a care­ful look at the sta­tis­tics re­leased by the Health Min­istry in the last two months shows that T&T av­er­aged two deaths per day dur­ing that pe­ri­od, while this av­er­age has risen to an as­ton­ish­ing av­er­age four deaths per day in the past three weeks. Hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions have al­so gone up dur­ing the pe­ri­od, al­though over­all in­fec­tion num­bers seem to have lev­elled off and are re­duc­ing.

There is much to de­ci­pher in these sta­tis­tics but the most cru­cial as­pect re­mains that per­sons with co­mor­bidi­ties and the un­vac­ci­nat­ed re­main the most sus­cep­ti­ble to be­com­ing fa­tal­i­ties to the dread­ed dis­ease. On the oth­er side, it is al­so quite pos­si­ble that the rea­son the in­fec­tions are de­creas­ing is that many cit­i­zens are util­is­ing home COVID tests when they ex­hib­it symp­toms and opt­ing not to re­port to pub­lic health fa­cil­i­ties on test­ing pos­i­tive, es­pe­cial­ly if the symp­toms are mild, which has been the case with the Omi­cron vari­ant, which is now the dom­i­nant strain in T&T.

And there­in lies the prob­lem now that the en­tire stu­dent pop­u­la­tion is back out to phys­i­cal class­es. As cit­i­zens well know, pupils in the low­er school lev­els are hard­er to con­trol in terms of ad­her­ing to a strict regime of phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing and sani­tis­ing. In fact, af­ter two years of not see­ing their friends phys­i­cal­ly, it is like­ly this will go out the door com­plete­ly in these first cou­ple weeks of the new aca­d­e­m­ic year as the stu­dents rekin­dle those friend­ships.

The old­er stu­dents will be more man­age­able but what this does mean is that the pos­si­bil­i­ty for spread in the class­room set­ting will in­crease, and so too will the like­li­hood of stu­dents tak­ing home the virus to their fam­i­lies and those they may in­ter­act with dur­ing their com­mute to and from school/uni­ver­si­ty.

Need­less to say, as the coun­try opens up to the re­turn of phys­i­cal school­ing, now is not the time to let our guards down on some of the oth­er key safe­ty pro­to­cols to avoid the spread of COVID-19.