(Photo by Pedro Fiuza/Xinhua)

Children under 3 to resume classes on Sept 21 with free visors

Classes for children under the age of three will resume on September 21, in a phased manner, with various protective measures against Covid-19, officials announced today (Thursday).

Dividing panels between students, reducing contacts, social distance and strengthening family education are measures that educational institutions for children under three years old will have to take, said the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) Director, Lou Pak Sang.

During a meeting with the media, Lou Pak Sang also indicated that each child will receive, free of charge, two protective visors for covid-19, since, he explained, international authorities do not recommend the use of masks on children under three years of age.

Next Monday, 41 schools will open for these students, and a week later another 17 will start classes.

About 23 per cent of parents of early childhood students will only put their children in schools when they are more than three years old, he detailed.

On the same occasion, the person responsible for education in the territory said that in this academic year there will be 85,014 students studying in non-tertiary education institutions in Macau, an increase of 2.8 per cent over last year.

With the exception of students under the age of three, all students have already resumed classes.

Most schools reopened from September 1, with the Portuguese School of Macau starting a week later.

The students of the territory had a troubled school year, with classes suspended in late January, due to the covid-19 pandemic. The return took place in a phased manner from May.

In order to ensure a safe return to school, DSEJ called on schools to do a good job in preventing and controlling the epidemic and advised students and teachers to “raise their awareness” of health care, “avoid traveling to infected areas and abroad” and ” keeping updated on the latest developments in the epidemic and restrictions on immigration”.

Schools were also “required to thoroughly clean and disinfect their ‘campuses'” before the start of the new school year, according to a note released by authorities in mid-August.

Social detachment, the obligatory use of a mask and temperature measurement should remain mandatory, in order to prevent the spread of the disease, in a territory that never registered community transmission.

Macau has registered 46 infections with the new coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, but it has never detected any community outbreak, and there is currently no active case.