The Acting Chief Medical Officer has moved to reassure parents and teachers that the risk of Covid-19 spreading amongst children in schools is low.
In an open letter, Dr Ronan Glynn, says while there is “no zero risk options”, now is the right time to reopen.
He says there’s enough evidence the risk’s outweighed by the benefits of being back in education.
Hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary students will be back at their desks today for the first time since March.
Chief Nursing Officer at the Department of Health, Rachel Kenna, explains what parents will be told if their child’s classmates tests positive saying “It’s going to be a watch & see what happens, the public health team they’re on high alert, they’re going to be working with the schools and of course it will depend on the public health evidence that we have on how this is managed and it won’t be the same for every situation but it will be a very quick response in terms of managing the positive cases”.
Meanwhile, a further 42 cases of the virus have been confirmed in Ireland to midnight Saturday.
12 of these are in seven counties, including Carlow, with another 24 in Dublin & six in Limerick.
22 are women, 20 male and 71% of them are aged under 45 years. 15 are confirmed to be associated with outbreaks or are close contacts of a confirmed case while six have been identified as community transmission
The Health Protection Surveillance Centre also says there have been no more related deaths.
To date 1,777 people have died in this country and 28,760 have have tested positive.
