New Delhi: As Covid restrictions are slowly eased across the country and public spaces open up, a survey has found that parents are still hesitant to send their children to school. This is more because of the severe nature of the second wave and the new virulent strains of the virus, which has affected more children than when the pandemic first started last year.
According to a survey by LocalCircles (a community social media platform), 76 per cent of parents in India are not willing to send their children to school till Covid cases in their district drop to zero or the children are vaccinated.
Conducted between 25 May and 15 June, the results of the survey were released Wednesday.
The survey interviewed 19,000 people across 293 districts in 23 states in the country, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
Of those interviewed, 49 per cent of the parents were from tier 1 districts, 29 per cent were from tier 2 districts and 22 per cent were from tier 3 & tier 4 districts (it is not mentioned on what basis the districts were categorised).
As many as 8,227 parents were unwilling to send their children to school until cases in their district came down to zero or the children were vaccinated.
Sixty-nine per cent of respondents wanted their children to be vaccinated by September 2021, if the facility was made available. Of the rest, 21 per cent wanted to wait till December 2021 and 8 per cent of the parents in the survey said they will not get their children vaccinated in 2021. The survey results do not mention why these parents are hesitant to have their children vaccinated.
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Second scare
According to the survey, because of the severe nature of the second Covid wave that hit the country earlier this year — and talks of a possible third wave approaching in six-eight weeks — the number of parents willing to send their children to schools has gone down.
While in January, 69 per cent of the parents had wanted schools to open by April 2021, the number dropped, following the second wave that started in March-April. Now only 20 per cent of parents want schools to open by July 2021.
Twenty per cent of all official deaths due to Covid-19 occurred in April 2021, during the second Covid wave. The second Covid wave, along with its virulent strain and lack of oxygen and medical supplies also saw more children getting infected.
Earlier, while some experts had said that more children and teenagers were likely to be affected in the third wave, results of a serological survey approved by AIIMS, published this month, assured that it was unlikely to be so.
Meanwhile, states such as Bihar, Telangana and Maharashtra have announced reopening of schools from July, while Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Haryana have decided to continue with online classes. In Karnataka, an expert committee headed by cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty has recommended that schools be reopened, but nothing has been announced by the government yet.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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