Seoul: According to the authorities, a day after reopening of schools in South Korea, a high-school was shut down on Thursday after the reports of a student came out to be positive for coronavirus. The school is in Daegu which is a southeastern city at the center of South Korea’s first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
Around 66 other schools were closed after two students tested positive for coronavirus in Incheon, a city near Seoul on Wednesday. These cases are expected to be linked with an outbreak in Itaewon, a nightlife district in the capital, which has been associated with more than 200 cases.
A Daegu Agricultural Meister High School senior who was residing in the school’s hostel has been confirmed to be infected with COVID-19, prompting the officials to close the school and make all other students return to their respective homes or be quarantined, according to in the city’s Metropolitan Office of Education, reads a report from Yonhap News Agency.
Schools got reopened nationwide on Wednesday after five coronavirus-related delays.
The high school senior students of the schools were the first group to attend offline classes with the other primary and secondary students told to return in stages to their school by June 8.
As these students returned to school on Wednesday, they had their temperatures checked, wore masks on campus mandatorily, and sat at desks that were spaced at a distance, in line with routine social distancing practices.
At the Daegu school, the infected student entered the dorm on Tuesday afternoon before taking a coronavirus test the following day which turned out to be positive.
The school was informed of the student’s positive result prior to the beginning of Wednesday’s first class. Hence, we wasn’t allowed to enter the classroom.
In accordance with its quarantine manual, the school isolated 17 students residing in the hostel and the remaining unexposed 94 seniors were sent home.
A total of 18 students who had direct contact with the infected student will be taking the coronavirus test, said the Yonhap News Agency report. The school has said that it will be closing its premises for two days for disinfection, while classes will be shifted back online.
Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) deputy director Kwon Jun-wook said on Thursday that schooling must take place together with disease prevention. “So we currently judge that it must continue in our current response regime, with the co-operation and participation of all our people,” Kwon said.