What are we to believe with all the mixed messaging on Covid safety in schools?

How can parents have full trust when public health authorities are not looking closely at what is happening in schools anymore?

At a time when the virus is utterly rampant in the community, parents will tell you they frequently don’t know how many cases are in a class. File picture

If the concept of the primary school parents’ WhatsApp group had not been invented before now, tens of thousands of them would have sprung into life over the past few weeks.

The frenzy of messages are relating to the often fruitless attempts to piece together the Covid scenario in a particular school. After all, parents all over the country have found themselves subject to the mushroom approach of being kept in the dark and fed plenty of you-know-what.

Primary school principals have been under the most intense pressure in recent weeks with Covid cases rising among teachers and pupils, and a lack of leadership and direction from education minister Norma Foley and her department.

In the words of one source familiar with the situation, many primary schools are surviving on a wing and a prayer, “with children in classrooms everywhere spending their days colouring”.

We have been repeatedly reassured the virus does not spread in schools and that the figures show this. How often have we heard the phrase “schools are a safe environment”. Just after mid-term, at the beginning of this month, Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan said the public health advice on schools is based on scientific evidence and the direct experience of the pandemic in Ireland.

It shows that child-to-child transmission is uncommon in school settings where there are preventive measures in place like those throughout our schools,” he said.

Roll forward to two days ago when deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn said public health officials had never said schools were safe, just a lower-risk environment, safer than many others. Schools are “less safe” now than they were several months ago.

Deputy chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn. Picture: Paddy Cummins /Collins Dublin

He was asked on Newstalk about Nphet’s position that schools are “lower risk” environments than other settings, and he said cases in schools are high because parents and children are not isolating properly.

“What I would fully accept is that schools are not as safe now as they were when incidence was lower a number of months ago,” said Dr Glynn.

No environment is as safe now as it was then. We’ve said all along that when incidence is really high in the community, as it is at the moment, then schools are not as safe as they would otherwise be.”

Well blow me over. Yesterday, we learned officially from a Health Protection Surveillance Report that primary school-aged children now have the highest Covid-19 incidence of any age group, with some 10,000 positive cases in the past fortnight.

The infection rate for primary school-aged children has been rising since mid-October. But according to the report, the risk of transmission within a school still remains “low”.

How can parents have full trust in where these cases are coming from when the public health authorities are simply not looking closely at what is happening in schools anymore?

We went from an overcautious approach to one where it seemed to be a risky free-for-all. 

As a follower of the minutiae of Covid — a necessary part of the job — I’d consider myself fairly well up on the detail. As a parent, I have an added incentive to try to work out what’s been happening in schools.

I had certainly begun to lose trust in recent times that a primary school was a safe environment, given that the vast majority of children are unvaccinated, apart from some in sixth class who are over 12 and whose parents have opted to get them jabbed.

This apparent change in the Nphet messaging is news to me. It also leaves a question hanging there about the actual safety of sending your child to school with virus levels this high.

At a time when the virus is utterly rampant in the community, parents will tell you they frequently don’t know how many cases are in a class, whether there is an infection in the pod your child happens to be in, or indeed how bad it needs to get for a class or a school to be closed. Principals, in turn, are also dealing with some parents who are refusing — for whatever reason — to get their child tested and continuing to send them into school.

One principal who spoke out quite plainly, and clearly in desperation this week, explained that out of 200 pupils in her Dublin school, St Catherine’s National School, 82 were at home.

In an interview with RTÉ, Karen Jordan said when she called the special hotline for principals, she was advised to close two classes.

“With 14 cases, we have been classed as an ‘outbreak’, but I know of schools with a lot more, and they are not being classed as outbreaks," she said.

It seems to depend on who you get when you contact the hotline.”

Ms Jordan spoke for many when she added: “Everybody is absolutely sick of it, schools are not safe. We need contact tracing to resume, and we need to be backed up by our ministers, by our Government, and by our union.”

Were parents not being told in case they decide to keep children at home and this started a domino effect? Surely this is a decision for individual parents to take? We’ve got paternalism on the use of antigen tests, and we seem to have it again here.

Education minister Norma Foley TD: Lack of leadership and direction. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

Ms Foley — the queen of platitudes — is not inspiring much confidence right now when you hear her speak about the safety of schools.

Last Thursday week, the Department of Education posted a joint announcement from Ms Foley and health minister Stephen Donnelly that arrangements for a system of antigen testing of asymptomatic close contacts in primary schools had been put in place by the HSE. It stated that the tests would be made available to the children in a primary school pod where a child in the pod has a PCR-detected Covid case, plus plans for the wider class and for informing parents.

However, the programme will commence on November 29, which is next Monday. So, in the absolute teeth of a crisis, with so many teachers and students absent with Covid, the two ministers make an announcement that is not be actioned for 11 days.

A series of much-needed measures were also announced to try to tackle the crisis caused by the estimated thousands of teachers out of school because of Covid.

The teachers' unions have credibility issues since earlier in the pandemic, but INTO general secretary John Boyle makes a very strong case saying he would be able to name 400 schools in the south Dublin area alone that have had breakouts in the past two weeks.

The week before last we were hearing that there were four outbreaks in primary schools and 16 children infected, whereas another set of data is showing that we now have 10,500 children infected.” he said on RTÉ. 

"So there seems to be a disconnect there."

Asked if he had confidence that schools are safe spaces, Mr Boyle said the INTO had always agreed with public health that they are as safe as their local communities, but that in some local communities right now, infections are really high “and are not exactly very safe”.

What to believe?