Coronavirus: Infected child make parents think again about school

A new coronavirus infection at a Sydney school has sparked fears among parents about whether to send their children back to class.

Warragamba Public School where a Year 2 student tested positive to the coronavirus. Picture: Gaye Gerard

It is only the second week of term and a new coronavirus infection at a Sydney school has sparked fears among parents about whether to send their children back to class.

The concerns were raised after NSW Health confirmed a seven-year-old at Warragamba Public School, in the city’s west, had ­tested positive to the virus, the state’s only new case in a 24-hour period. The boy is one of a small number of students who have been attending the school throughout the pandemic.

The school was closed for cleaning and contact tracing on Monday, with those who had come into proximity with the infected student warned they needed to stay home and self-isolate.

While the school was scheduled to reopen on Tuesday — and despite repeated proclamations schools were safe — not all parents have been convinced.

Sarah, whose son is in Year 3 at Warragamba, said the news of the infection had caused her to reconsider sending her child to school.

“My son is an asthmatic and I have a thyroid disease so I really don’t want him to get it and bring it home,” she told The Australian.

She said she planned to continue with home-schooling until she was confident there would be no further cases at the school.

“It’s just safer at the moment. We don’t know if other students will have it or if teachers will have it now,” she said.

“There’s that 14-day period where no symptoms will show.

“It would be good for him to go back to school but at the ­moment I think health and safety is the most important thing. It’s hard to keep kids apart from each other.

“There’s only so many times you can tell a child to stay away from each other. That’s what worries me. They all use the same bathroom and are in the same classroom.”

Another parent, who wished to remain anonymous, said her son, a Year 2 student, had been ­attending Warragamba during the pandemic because of her work in the allied health industry.

“Now that someone has tested positive at the school, we have to re-evaluate that,” she said. “Given people in our community have tested positive, we are currently trying to decide if it safer for us to go down the path of home-schooling. I think the answer is yes.”

She said it would be difficult to juggle at-home learning and the running of her business with her husband. “It’s now been both stressful for me to keep my kids at home and stressful to send my kids to school,” she said.

The student’s positive result was the only one from 5500 tests conducted across NSW on Sunday. It was the lowest daily rise in more than eight weeks, though the source of the boy’s infection is ­unknown.

In Melbourne’s north, Meadowglen Primary School has been closed for three days after a staff member tested positive.

At the weekend, the schools closure debate reached a cres­cendo, with federal Education Minister Dan Tehan accusing Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews of “taking a sledgehammer” to the state’s school system and a “failure of leadership”.

He later withdrew the comments, saying that personal frustration had “led him to overstep the mark”.