The Department of Education (DepEd) should provide epidemiological data to determine the risk of schools to be exposed to COVID-19 transmissions instead of relying on an area’s quarantine classification.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chair of the Senate Committee on Basic Education, Arts and Culture, on Tuesday as he continued to press the DepEd to provide science-based criteria in choosing sites for the pilot tests of limited localized face-to-face classes.
“It’s not only the quarantine restrictions, but you have to go much more granular in terms of location and the matrices that should be used in terms of assessing risk,” Gatchalian said in a statement.
“So I would recommend that you go deeper beyond the quarantine level, use scientific and public health-based matrices, and create a ‘heat map’ for a better risk assessment,” he said.
Gatchalian also said he hopes that the agency would tap epidemiology experts so they can be provided proper recommendations.
“So we can ascertain what are the right places where we can conduct a pilot-testing of face-to-face classes,” he stressed.
Citing the criteria of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the mapping of pilot areas at the local government unit (LGU) level, Gatchalian said an area should have less than 10 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population in the past seven days.
UNICEF also recommended that pilot tests be done in areas with less than five percent positivity rates, while LGUs should have an active contact tracing and surveillance system. It also recommended that schools participating in the pilot tests should also have an inventory of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) facilities. It also pointed out that LGUs should assess the capacity of schools to implement infection prevention and control aside from cleaning and disinfection of facilities.
“The signal that superintendents might get is that as long as you are in an MGCQ (modified general community quarantine) area, it’s all right to launch a pilot testing program,” he noted.
“However, if you look at an MGCQ status, it has very general restrictions and it doesn’t talk about the public health aspect of epidemiology,” the senator lamented.
Gatchalian added some highly-urbanized cities which tend to be dense are under MGCQ while having more than 100 active cases.
The lawmaker earlier warned that without considering factors like the transmission and positivity rates, parents might not have the confidence to allow their children’s participation in the pilot tests of face-to-face classes.
“We should form a panel of experts even within the DepEd to tell us where we can pilot that safely, because ultimately what’s important here is the safety of our teachers, and especially our parents,” Gatchalian said in a televised interview on Monday, March 8.
“When we open classes, the parents also go out to bring their students or to bringing their children to school and they pick them up...So, these are the things that we should look at and study not only looking at other models in other countries,” he said.