Concerned about Omicron, but Min of Ed Confident Schools Will follow Protocols

But, the number of active cases skyrocketing continues to be of grave concern not only to parents, but also to the Ministry of Education, and it’s planned reopening of schools in the next few days. While it is widely speculated that the increasing numbers reflect that the omicron variant is in Belize, C.E.O. Maheia says they are going full speed ahead because a report shows that COVID cases during the last semester of hybrid learning originated outside of the school setting.

Dian Maheia

Dian Maheia, C.E.O., Ministry of Education

“The attention that we paid to the schools or the close to one hundred who opened for hybrid between October and December, looking at those schools that exercise showed us that we had something like nine hundred teachers who were engaged in hybrid learning for those months. And of the nine hundred teachers, we saw one hundred and thirty-three of them who had COVID; that translated to about a fourteen percent positivity rate among the teachers. With the students, there were about seven thousand – that was the approximate population of students who were engaged and there a hundred and forty-five students which translated to about two percent of the population of students who were engaged in hybrid who contracted COVID; again, during that October to December period that we tracked. So we recognised that there were instances of COVID in the schools. We recognised that based on those situations that we monitored, that the COVID cases seem to have originated mostly from outside the schools. And what we saw was that within the schools, procedures and protocols were being followed. What I find is that it is difficult for adults to believe that students follow protocols, but they really do. Children are so wonderful about understanding and appreciating structures and there’s no set of people in the world better than putting structures in place than teachers.”

Over eighty-five percent of the teaching staff across the country is vaccinated, while over fifteen percent of children twelve years and older have been vaccinated.