Macao’s teachers and students will no longer be required to undergo a rapid antigen test (RAT) when going to school and participating in academic competitions or other activities, starting next Monday.
Covid-19’s impact on teachers and students continued to decrease after Chinese New Year (CNY), during which no collective novel coronavirus infections were detected in schools, the Education and Youth Development Bureau announced yesterday.
However, teachers and students who feel discomfort should take a RAT at home before going to school. The bureau stressed that if their RAT result is positive, they should neither go to school nor participate in competitions and activities.
Physical education classes and extracurricular physical activities can be gradually resumed from Monday for students who recovered from Covid-19 before the CNY holiday. However, teachers still need to adjust the curriculum, training content and assessment requirements as appropriate, based on individual students’ health conditions.
The bureau underlined that students who have recently been infected with Covid-19 and are in the early stage of recovery or feel unwell should take the initiative to inform their schools so that their teachers can avoid putting them through high-intensity exercise.
In related news, Han Zitian, an associate professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology’s Faculty of Innovation Engineering told TDM yesterday that with the weakening of the antibodies of Covid-19 convalescents, another wave is expected to occur in May, infecting as many as five percent of the population.
However, Han said, the speed of transmission “will not be fast”, adding that the daily peak number of infected patients was expected to be just about one per cent, or about 6,000, of Macao’s population.
Han said his survey centre estimated that about 80 to 90 per cent of people in Macao were infected with Covid-19 during the outbreak last December, most of them members of “susceptible groups” who had not been infected before the outbreak so that the virus spread rapidly, with one person infecting about nine to 12 others, The Macau Post Daily reported.
