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MOH to partner with Education Ministry to immunize teachers against COVID-19
Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony
Kaieteur News – The Ministry of Health (MOH) is seeking to collaborate with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to have teachers immunized against COVID-19.
This is according to the Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, who made the revelation while delivering the COVID-19 update on Wednesday.
Dr. Anthony explained that with the ongoing immunization campaign, the government would be targeting frontline workers, which are not limited to frontline health care workers. “Then also as another group of persons working on the frontline would, of course, be teachers because they would interface with students and so forth. While we have not opened all the schools or all the classes, there is still some classroom interaction,” he stated.
Notably, while most students across the country are engaged in virtual learning, the MOE, with permission from the MOH, sought to reopen schools for Grades 10, 11, 12 and Technical and Vocational Education students for face-to-face classes on November 9, last year. The conditional reopening was approved to provide students with efficient teaching, so that they could complete their School-Based Assessments (SBAs) and Internal Assessments (IAs), in light of the upcoming 2021 Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Examination and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).
Upon consultations with teachers and students, both parties were extremely concerned that they would not be prepared for CSEC and CAPE next year because there was a lack of face-to-face classes.
Dr. Anthony believes that despite social distancing and other regulations implemented to prevent the spread of the virus within schools, teachers are providing an essential service; hence, it is pertinent that they are protected against the virus.
Further, Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, recently announced the possibility of all schools reopening for face-to-face learning after the Easter holiday, since the government has a robust vaccination program planned for the month of March. However, the decision can only be made with directives from the MOH.
She had stated that the possible reopening would be in an effort to align with the international best practice of having students at all levels back in schools. According to Manickchand, this is to combat the long-term impact of no physical classes. “The research suggests that the longer schools stay closed, the more long-term disadvantages we’ll have, the more students are likely to drop out, and the more students are likely to suffer from learning loss or severe learning loss.”
The rollout of the government’s COVID-19 immunization campaign thus far, has seen a large number of frontline health workers being vaccinated along with elderly persons 60 years and above. Persons with co-morbidities are next in line. Frontline health workers were given first preference in the immunization programme.
Guyana’s COVID-19 immunization programme had kick-started with the donation of 3,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from Barbados, which saw 2,800 being allocated to frontline healthcare workers and the remainder was given to workers at the CARICOM Secretariat.
Another donation of 20,000 doses of the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine also arrived this week from China.
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