The president (LR) of the departmental council of Bas-Rhin Frédéric Bierry "invited" on Thursday the parents of pupils of the department "not to send their children to school before May 25" if they can "to avoid new chains of contamination ” of the coronavirus. "The Covid has easy prey, it wreaks havoc on our elders and it advances quietly with our children, especially the youngest who are, we are told, asymptomatic," said Frédécric Bierry in a press release. "It is to avoid new chains of contamination that I invite the parents of pupils not to send their children to school before May 25 if they have the capacity to continue to accompany them schooling and to keep them at home", he continues.
Nursery and primary schools must reopen gradually from May 11. But the president of the departmental council of Bas-Rhin, noting that "the epidemic is not receding" , underlines that "Alsace is marked with the hot iron of the pandemic". The Bas-Rhin was among the 35 departments on Thursday, most of them located in Ile-de-France and in the northeast quarter of France, classified for the first time "in red" due to the high circulation of coronavirus and tensions over resuscitation capacities.
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According to the Grand Est Regional Health Agency, 2,799 patients have died from coronavirus in hospitals in the region since the start of the epidemic. 4,170 Covid-19 patients were still hospitalized there on Tuesday, including 605 in intensive care or intensive care. For Frédéric Bierry, "the return to a mass schooling would risk relaunching the pandemic in the next 15 days and would put in difficulty the caregivers already exhausted by the episode of pandemic in progress" . He suggests that parents who "have no childcare solutions or (whose) child is not sufficiently independent" to contact the Family Allowance Fund.
The department, which "already organizes the care of the children of nursing staff, paramedics, and police and gendarmerie personnel" , will be able to accommodate "children (who) are not sufficiently independent to remain at home alone" and whose parents return to work, specifies Frédéric Bierry. The Bas-Rhin has ordered three million masks which will be distributed gradually from May 11, he added.
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