A total of 20 Ontario schools are now closed due to COVID-19 outbreaks or for operational reasons related to the pandemic, surpassing the previous high set late last month.
The Ministry of Education says that there are currently 944 schools with at least one active case of COVID-19, accounting for nearly 20 per cent of the province’s public schools.
So far COVID-19 outbreaks have been declared at 308 of those schools, which is the highest that number has been throughout the entire pandemic.
There are also at least 279 individual classrooms that are currently self-isolating in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area alone, though that number is likely an underrepresentation of the true impact on in-person learning as only some boards publicly post the data.
Meanwhile, school-related case counts continue to rise in lockstep with a surge in cases in the broader community.
According to the latest data there were another 214 new school-related cases of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus confirmed over a 24-hour period ending Friday afternoon. That is up from 178 cases during the same time period last week.
The number of active infections associated with the public school system now stands at 2,244, up approximately 20 per cent week-over-week.
During the 2020-2021 school year it took until March 30 to reach that number and about one week later schools were closed for in-person learning for what turned out to be the remainder of the academic year.
This time around public health officials have insisted that schools can be kept safe and that the approval of vaccines for children aged five to 11 will provide another lever of protection.
However, there are mounting concerns about the efficacy of vaccines against the new Omicron variant, particularly for individuals who have not yet received a booster dose.
“If you have a very transmissible variant that chips away at the effectiveness of two doses of the vaccine we clearly need an accelerated third dose program,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch told CP24 on Monday morning. “Those 50 plus are eligible, that will extend to lots of people who work in schools but of course not everyone who works in schools. This is really the time where we really need a community level effort to get people their third doses.”
There have been a total of 9,530 school-related cases of COVID-19 confirmed since classes resumed in September.
At this point in 2020 there had been fewer than half as many lab-confirmed cases among public school students and staff (4,623).
