Lanzarote has 131 active cases of Covid in students and teachers and 15 classrooms confined

Both Health and Education confirm four outbreaks in Arrecife, although they assure that they are ramifications and that none has more than two associated cases

February 2 2021 (19:51 WET)
Updated in February 2 2021 (20:24 WET)
Disinfection work in Lanzarote's educational centers

Lanzarote has 131 active cases of Covid among students and teachers in the island's educational centers and 15 classrooms confined, as confirmed by the Ministry of Education of the Government of the Canary Islands to La Voz.

Specifically, there are 121 positive cases among students, while there are eleven infected teachers, which represents 0.50% of the total number of students and teachers. According to details, there are 24,740 students in the island's educational centers and 1,293 teachers.

Both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health have confirmed to La Voz the existence of four outbreaks in educational centers in Arrecife, although they have assured that they are ramifications of family outbreaks. In this regard, although an outbreak would imply that there have been infections within the educational center, neither Education nor Health confirm this. However, they insist that none of these four outbreaks has more than two associated cases in the educational field. It should be remembered that for an outbreak to be declared, there must be at least three cases, and if it is a ramification, there must have been at least one infection within that second area.

Meanwhile, La Voz has been receiving complaints from parents of different centers since, with a significant volume of Covid cases in society, there are also more positive cases within educational centers, which is generating concern.

"Here there are more than 10 infected children, and as there are 10, who knows how many more there are. Why don't they close the schools?", said a mother from a school in Arrecife. However, the fact that there is more than one case in the same educational center does not mean that they are linked to each other or that infections are occurring within the center.


More than 80 classrooms in quarantine and 528 positives in the Canary Islands

In the Canary Islands as a whole, until last Friday there were a total of 82 classrooms in quarantine due to Covid, which represented 0.4% of the total number of Infant, Primary, Secondary and Baccalaureate groups existing in public, subsidized and private educational centers in the Canary Islands, which amount to a total of 17,000.

In this regard, Education emphasizes that this figure remained within the range of those recorded in the third wave, although the truth is that it has doubled compared to the previous week and 14 days before there were only 0.04% of confined groups. In fact, according to the data that the Ministry itself gives weekly, the number of isolated groups had never exceeded 0.3% since November.

Regarding active cases, the Ministry pointed out that among teaching staff there were 102 out of more than 32,000 teachers, and that in students there were 416, among the more than 335,000 enrolled in the archipelago. And of those students, more than a quarter are from Lanzarote.

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