Media report: Greek schools will reopen with more COVID-19 testing

Despite division over what was safer, Greece’s schools will reopen Jan 10 after a holiday break, during which the Omicron Variant brought record numbers of COVID-19 cases, with students and staff required to take more tests to check for the Coronavirus.

One member of the government’s advisory panel of doctors and scientists felt bringing students back would see the virus further spread in classrooms but the Education Ministry said it would be safer to have students in a controlled environment.

They and teachers and school staff will be required to take three self-tests a week, on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday to make sure they are not infected but no way to determine the identity if someone testing positive wants to keep it hidden and present someone else’s negative test.

Education Minister Niki Kerameus told Kathimerini that reopening schools will make it easier to monitor students through more health measures, noting they must wear masks compared to being elsewhere with their friends.

“It is better for children to come to school and have checks done within the school environment than the opposite,” she said, noting that so far in the school year that in 80 percent of instances of infection there was never a second case because of the controls.

Another protocol will require rapid tests instead of self-tests for all classmates of an infected pupil although students are not required to be vaccinated and there’s no accounting of how many are not inoculated.

The government decided not to require a rapid test before the schools open because it would be too expensive and there was not a sufficient mechanism to deal with 1.4 million students in only a few days, the paper said.

Under consideration is whether to close classes or schools if 30 percent of students are infected instead of 50 percent plus one, and the report said that private tutoring schools and universities are included in the measures.