The school year started again last Monday, and in less than a week there are already several infections from Coronavirus,reported in the Berlin institutions: there is also the case of a first school that has decided to close its doors. It is the Berliner Zeitung, one of the capital's tabloids, to list the seven schools (in four neighborhoods) in which the cases (single as far as we know for now) of infection have been recorded. Institutions have reacted mostly by quarantining groups of students or classes, while Angela Merkel meets SPD leader Saskia Esken and several Laender education ministers today in the chancellery to take stock of the situation. The management of the sector is headed by the regions, and in the city-state of Berlin the local senate has decided to restart the lessons, even abolishing the rule of distancing in the classroom. However, schoolchildren are required to wear masks in school buildings (but not seated at desks). The ease of local politics has raised discordant opinions and controversies. The trade union GEW pointed out that it would have been better to start again by alternating face-to-face and online lessons, keeping the division into groups, as was the case in June. In Germany, Covid has begun to spread in a worrying way, with over a thousand new cases of infection per day: today there are 1445, according to data from the Robert Koch Institut; while in Berlin 125 more positives were reported, compared to the previous day.
And while the AFP reports that the death toll from coronavirus in the world has exceeded the threshold of 750,000, 200,000, well over the 166,038 counted by Johns Hopkins University would be in the United States alone. The New York Times reports that many states are weeks if not months behind in reporting the death toll.