The National Youth Council of Moldova presented a petition by which it demands to stop the education process with the physical presence of students in classes and to return to online learning until the number of active cases of COVID-19 decreases at least to the level of this January, IPN reports.

According to the authors of the petition, the COVID-19 pandemic is now at its height and the number of infections continues to rise, while the teachers of the ninth and twelfth grades and the university lecturers work as usual.

“According to a private medical laboratory in Chisinau, of the 100 tests with a positive result, about 90 contain the British strain. The British authorities said the new variant is by 70% more contagious than the initial strain. Also, a study published recently in the British Medical Journal shows that the new strain is 32% to 104% more lethal than the initial variant,” says the petition.

The Council reminds the data published by the authorities, according to which the number of teachers confirmed with COVID was by 20% higher than that of students. The young people are less affected by the virus compared with the adults, but, owing to their active lifestyle, these pose an increased infection risk to teachers and older persons. The infected teachers have to cover the costs of treatment following infection and the subsequent complications themselves.

According to the Council, if the experienced teaching staff becomes infected, the return to classrooms after the pandemic wave and online lessons will be impossible. This way, the young people will fail again to study the content and will lose interest in learning. An affected math teacher means 90 graduate students outside classes during one or two weeks in the best case.

The petition authors request the authorities to take urgent measures to ensure the access of all the children of school age to online learning, to outfit the teachers with equipment and appropriate conditions and to identify possibilities for the parents and teachers to be able to monitor the activity of students during online classes and school performance.

On March 5, the public association “Solidary Parents” mounted a protest in front of the Government Building, demanding that the students should return to classrooms.