Wiltshire's Public Health boss gives schools 'utmost credit' for handling pandemic
Case rates have remained high in the county
Wiltshire's Public Health Director has said schools are doing a "tremendous" job considering the difficult situation with Covid cases.
The county is seeing the highest case rate in the 5-14 school age group, with education settings also seeing many staff being off as well.
Late last week, schools reported to Wiltshire Council that a total of 439 staff members and 2,899 pupils were off due to Covid.
Kate Blackburn wants to give them the "utmost credit" for working through this difficult situation.
Mrs Blackburn told Greatest Hits Radio:
"On a daily basis we have about 120 schools who are notifying us of staff and pupil cases. The team do a very thorough risk assessment, support the school in terms of what additional measures they can take up. To be fair, our schools are really expert now in understanding how best they can communicate the risk and how best they can mitigate the risk. National policy changes quite often and so certain things that we may have been doing previously, just after the Christmas period face coverings for children in secondary schools were back in. Of course that was then stopped, but actually where we have outbreaks in certain settings we may reintroduce those measures for a very short period of time to stop transmission, but it's never done as a blanket approach and it's never done lightly, it's always done in conjunction with the school and with our public health team to really make sure that we're doing the best to maintain that excellent educational provision.
"Our educational settings are doing and have been doing a phenomenal job throughout this pandemic and the provision of face to face education has been maintained incredibly well. There have been a significant number of staff sickness so classes will have had to have been taught by other teachers and our schools have taken a really flexible approach to ensuring that that can happen, and I think it's really difficult. We are still in a pandemic, there are very, very high levels of virus circulating and certain settings like schools, like hospitals, like care homes is where we see that big effect in terms of loss of staff. I would give our schools the upmost credit in terms of how they've handled this and dealt with this."
CURRENT CASE NUMBERS
Latest data from government shows that in the seven days to the 3rd February, there were 5,340 positive cases in Wiltshire.
That's a decrease of 633 from the following week.
It means that the county's case rate per 100,000 population is at 1,059.4.
That's above the national average of 905.8.