School buses at the door of a school in Brooklyn (New York), on October 6.ANGELA WEISS / AFP
New York, which was the first major city in the United States to reopen schools after the spring closure, will close them again as of this Thursday after just eight weeks of face-to-face classes, with the positivity rate for schools reaching 3%. coronavirus tests, in the average of the last seven days (in Spain, the rate is 12.19% from November 11 to 14).
The decision has been communicated by the mayor of the city, Democrat Bill de Blasio.
New York is the largest network of public schools in the country.
Private companies are not affected by the announcement in principle, and some have already communicated that they will continue their activities with all security measures.
“New York has reached the 3% positivity threshold in the last seven days.
Unfortunately, that means public schools must close as of tomorrow, Thursday, November 19, as a precautionary measure.
We must fight the second wave of covid-19 ”, the councilor tweeted, after making himself wait for three and a half hours in his daily appearance before the media, to which he finally did not appear.
The 3% positivity was the limit established to reverse the normalization of educational activity, and its closure had already been considered last week if the Big Apple crossed that threshold.
“Parents should have a plan for the rest of the month of November,” De Blasio warned then.
The closure is the biggest setback suffered by the city since the gradual reopening of activities in summer, and a very concrete setback for De Blasio, who had fiercely defended the return to class.
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo also supports keeping the centers open.
The metrics used by the city and the State differ, so for the latter the prorated rate of positivity for the last week is below 3%.
Approximately 300,000 minors who followed a hybrid program of face-to-face and virtual classes will go back to studying remotely, from their homes, with the consequent difficulty in providing care or care for their parents or guardians.
The closure is decreed as a supplementary precautionary measure, since the rate of transmission of the coronavirus in schools had remained very low since the end of September, when the classrooms reopened.
In fact, epidemiologists do not consider contagion in schools to be decisive in the increase in cases in the city, but rather that of social gatherings and the normalized influx of bars, restaurants and gyms, which nevertheless remain open, although with limitations of schedule and capacity since last Friday.
The director of the New York public education system, Richard A. Carranza, reported on his Twitter account that classes will continue "remotely until further notice" and that students who attended schools for part of the week " they will have to make a transition ”.
“The mayor and I were clear from day one that we needed to get the students back to the classroom as soon as it was safe.
That same urgency supports this temporary closure: we will bring students to classrooms as soon as we can, safely, "said the local Minister of Education, who stressed that the city will offer families" support with [electronic] devices and remote teaching instructions ”, plus free meals for needy students.
New York is home to the largest network of schools in the US, with 1,800 schools and 1.1 million students.
The public system fundamentally attracts children from Latino and African-American families, who are precisely the groups hardest hit by the pandemic, and those that may have the most material problems to face
online
education
due to lack of computer resources.
New York State was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic during the first wave of infections.
Currently, it is the fifth most affected state, with more than 568,000 infections, which have caused more than 34,000 deaths.
The United States is the country hardest hit by the covid-19 pandemic in the world, both in number of infections and in number of deaths from the disease, with an average of 158,000 new cases per day last week (an increase of 79 % compared to two weeks before).
Information about the coronavirus
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- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in the world
- Download the tracking application for Spain
- Guide to action against the disease
