In France Covid still closes classes and the masks resurface

For the past two weeks, 12.8 million primary and secondary school students have taken their masks off in class.

However, it remains ” strongly recommended “, indoors, from the age of 6, for contact persons at risk during the 7 days after the occurrence of the confirmed case as well as for confirmed cases during the 7 days following their period of isolation. , according to the current protocol.

Only a prefectural decision, in the event of a local cluster, could force the return of the mask to the nose and mouth of the students.

At the end of last week, the Ministry of National Education reported 3,184 classes closed due to Covid in France, against 2,693 a week before. New figures are to be released this Friday.

“We know they won’t be good because, in the field, the number of positive Covid cases has only been increasing for a week among students and teachers, here we go again,” worries Guislaine. David, the general secretary of SNUipp-FSU, the first primary school union.

And who says case of Covid in the class says recommended return of the mask. “ We then find ourselves with students who wear it again and others who don’t. Some children no longer understand anything,” says Stéphane Crochet, secretary general of SE-Unsa.

For Isabelle, a mother in Paris of a little girl in CP, “it’s no”. “I received an email from the director inviting us to hide our children again because there is a case in the class. My 6-year-old daughter had the Covid two months ago, that’s enough, I refuse to impose that on her,” insists the 41-year-old mother, “exhausted” by all these protocols for two years.

For a week, several schools in France have thus recommended wearing a mask, in particular in the North or in Brittany, areas in which the epidemic is strong.

After two years of Covid, parents of students are cautious. “We thought we were reaching the end of the tunnel and in fact, we are going backwards, so there is general fatigue,” says Laurent Zameczkowski, spokesperson for the Peep parents’ federation.