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An empty classroom in a school in Munich (symbolic picture)
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
At the very beginning of the pandemic, some of his students still believed that the coronavirus did not exist.
Or at least that Sars-CoV-2 does not seriously threaten them and their families.
This is what a teacher reports, who is supposed to be called Peter Gruber here, because he fears disadvantages if his real name is published.
Peter Gruber says: that then the father of a tenth grader died of Covid-19.
And the students suddenly took the virus seriously.
"The children are now sticking to the measures exactly," he says.
Some told him that they now felt uncomfortable in classes with 30 students, even if everyone wore masks and was aired regularly.
Where Gruber teaches, at a secondary school in the Hamburg district of Wilhelmsburg, the pandemic is currently particularly rampant.
In the Hanseatic city, the incidence is around 80 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants within the last seven days.
In Wilhelmsburg the value was recently over 200, in the neighboring district of Veddel it was even 350. At a time when young people in particular are infected, this is not good news for the schools in the area.
The pandemic of the unvaccinated
Socially disadvantaged people tend to live in both districts south of the Elbe.
It is currently showing again that the virus is striking harder in such poorer districts.
Here, people often live closer together in less space and can work less often in the home office - at least that's what the previous attempts to explain.
Now comes the fact that unvaccinated people get infected first and foremost.
And the pandemic of the unvaccinated, which has often been mentioned recently, seems to affect the socially disadvantaged in particular.
Gruber also believes that, like almost all teachers in his teaching staff, he has long since been vaccinated.
In the student body it looks different.
He doesn't have any numbers, says Gruber.
But he is certain: Compared with young people from other parts of the city, fewer students were vaccinated at his school in the group of 12 to 17-year-olds for whom the Stiko vaccination commission had recently made a recommendation.
A Hamburg pediatrician suspects something similar.
One of her patients from one of the better-off parts of the city was asked weeks ago whether she still had friends who wanted to be vaccinated spontaneously because the vaccine was left over at short notice.
Attempts by the 17-year-old to find someone on her cell phone failed.
All were vaccinated at least once, most of them twice.
This imbalance is also likely to have consequences for teaching in schools in hot spots. If someone in a class is infected with Sars-CoV-2, then the person not only has to be isolated at home, but in the worst case the whole class also has to be quarantined.
Gruber knows from his experience in the pandemic that weaker students do not learn as well at home as they do at school.
Here, too, the social gradient has a negative effect: children from wealthier families are more likely to have technical equipment for digital learning than those from poorer families.
"Corona has aggravated the problems that we already had before," says Gruber.
»The good students were able to advance their achievements.
But the bad got even worse. ”Basically, the same applies again to rich and poor students.
If the fourth wave continues like this, up to a million students could be in quarantine at the same time, the German Teachers Association recently warned.
But currently the situation with the quarantine regulations is confusing.
For example, anyone who goes to school in North Rhine-Westphalia and tests positive for the corona virus must also be in quarantine directly next to them, as well as teachers and other school staff if they have been in close contact with the person concerned. If protective measures such as keeping your distance, wearing a mask or ventilation could not be observed, other classmates can also be quarantined.
The regulation by NRW Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer (FDP) is currently facing massive criticism.
The chairwoman of the Education and Science Union (GEW) in North Rhine-Westphalia, Ayla Çelik, described them as "unrealistic".
That misses the reality of life in schools and involves great risks, she told SPIEGEL.
"Children and adolescents don't sit in their seats all day, and aerosols don't stay there either." Schoolchildren are agile, come out of the break, and meet each other.
The quarantine should therefore apply to entire classes, but pupils can quickly test themselves for face-to-face lessons using a PCR test.
Protection options not yet exhausted
On the other hand, Heike Riedmann from the »Family Initiative« believes that Education Minister Gebauer's course is the right one. The hurdles for ordering a quarantine would have to be particularly high. Children should have as much face-to-face teaching as possible; serious illnesses tend to be rare for them, but the collateral damage is immense if they are excluded from lessons. "Quarantine is imprisonment and means a lot of stress, especially for families in cramped conditions." For this reason, the "Family Initiative" has started a petition, in which it says: "Quarantine is the greatest burden on children, adolescents and their families is expected. "
Riedmann thinks the protection options for schoolchildren have not yet been exhausted.
You have to quarantine infected children and adolescents, but not their contact persons.
These could be tested closely instead of being excluded from face-to-face teaching.
In addition, infected children and adolescents should only be isolated for as long as they are contagious.
Different from school to school
Which students have to be quarantined if a classmate tests positive not only differs from state to state, but sometimes also from school to school. In most cases, the health department decides who is sent home. In their decision, the employees take into account the prevailing circumstances at the school, such as which protective measures have been implemented and how many students and teachers have already been vaccinated or have recovered.
The Saarland Ministry of Health writes: "It is always an individual decision whether only direct contact persons or the entire school class have to be classified as close contact persons." However, the ministry assumes that it will again occur more frequently to classify all class members as close contact persons and in this case to be sent to quarantine.
From Lower Saxony it says: "It may result that no classmates or only classmates close to the index person or the entire class are classified as close contacts." Quarantine is recommended for the beta or gamma virus variants.
In Bremen, a so-called real cohort is determined on the days in question.
According to the Robert Koch Institute, these are people who have been in close contact with the infected person for more than ten minutes, who have not kept a distance of one and a half meters from the person or who have been in the same room at the same time with a likely high concentration of infectious aerosols.
For this group, the school management arranges distance learning.
Fully vaccinated people are not classified as close contacts and do not need to be quarantined.
In Thuringia, they want to coordinate a uniform procedure for the federal state.
And regulations on quarantine regulations are currently being drawn up in Baden-Württemberg as well.
Provided that the hygiene measures in the classes are observed, aerosol researcher Alfred Wiedensohler from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research considers it sufficient if, in the event of infections, only those sitting next to you in a class are quarantined. "If you wear an FFP2 mask, the likelihood of contracting an infected person is very low," says Wiedensohler. To send the whole class into quarantine, if they have been aired regularly and the distance has been kept? "That would be overly cautious," he says. However, the scientist emphasizes that only an FFP2 mask provides reliable protection. With the medical masks, the contagious particles would not be filtered.
The Hamburg teacher Peter Gruber now hopes that as few people as possible become infected at his school.
Every 20 minutes he pulls open the window and makes sure that all students wear masks and test themselves twice a week.
In addition, he can put a protective wall made of Plexiglas on his teacher's desk.
But whether that will be enough to get through this autumn in face-to-face classes is questionable and depends on whether his students want to be vaccinated.
It is not known how many children in Hamburg are vaccinated in which parts of the city.
Although the individual schools keep lists, the school authorities said at the request of SPIEGEL, the numbers are not recorded centrally.
It would be particularly important to recognize where there may be more need and where one could specifically strive for higher vaccination rates. After all, everyone should soon have the opportunity to have a vaccination: Hamburg will soon offer around 100,000 pupils at district schools and grammar schools a vaccination if they are at least twelve years old.
