Jalisco continues to strive for the return to face-to-face classes for the next school year.
This Saturday, the state government announced that the return to the classrooms in basic education will be on August 30, through a hybrid model based on age groups. This will allow face-to-face classes for lower grade levels, while upper secondary and higher education classes will return remotely in August and then in person in September. The University of Guadalajara will begin its 2021-B school year virtually on August 10, and at the end of the month, the possibility will be analyzed for the starting of the face-to-face phase on September 15.
"The decision that has been taken as a whole is that we are going to return to the face-to-face classes with care, with protocols, with sanitary measures, and with a modality that… has been designed in a staggered manner," said the Governor of Jalisco Enrique Alfaro during the press conference.
The president added that the gradual route back to the presence, implemented since August 2020 to date, has worked, since there have been no chains of infections. The model that was presented this Saturday will be evaluated, together with the support of the teaching profession, to continue on a permanent basis and may undergo changes, depending on the progress and development of the pandemic in this new wave.
“If we are waiting for the end of the virus to return to classes, we can wait (a long time) and we will not allow it. We are going to make decisions in the coming days to avoid concentrations in activities that are not a priority. We can sacrifice other things, less the return of our girls and boys, of our young people, to the classrooms. We cannot lock up our children again, and we cannot continue living in fear,” he added.
The World Health Organization has stated that the COVID-19 virus could become endemic, but that like other viruses you can live with it by finding the therapies to treat it on a day-to-day basis.
The rector of the University of Guadalajara, Ricardo Villanueva Lomelí, reported that after an analysis of the Health Situation Room, the University of Guadalajara (UdeG), determined that the return to classes on August 10 will be 100% virtual.
“From August 10 to September 15 the decision is that it will be virtual, on August 30 we will be analyzing again, making a cut of how the pandemic is going. In the previous vacation periods it has been seen that the cases get worse, therefore this vacation period forces the University to be very prudent and that is why we have decided that the return to classes will be 100% virtual,” he pointed out.
He explained that the decision is based on how the cases are by age ranges of the school-age groups, since while in pre-school it is only 0.2 percent of the cases, in primary 1.1 percent, in high school youth it is 1.7 percent, in high school and university it is 36.8 percent.
In this new wave, Jalisco registers 40% fewer hospitalizations and there is a mortality 10 times lower, this despite the fact that the acceleration of infections is seven times greater than the first wave.
He added that 74.9% of hospitalizations are from age groups that have already had the possibility to get vaccinated.
The Secretary of Health, Fernando Petersen Aranguren, stressed that vaccination is the most important protection measure since it has shown how it has drastically reduced deaths in different population groups.