Schools in the US are slowly reopening due to the rapid spread of Omicron | Coronavirus Plague News

The crisis leaves many parents struggling to find child care, leading to chaos in early 2022.

Inside Omicron changes that are pushing coronavirus in the United States, thousands of schools – including some major cities – have delayed returning to class after vacation or changing long courses.

The sheer number of cases has raised serious concerns for health officials and medical systems in many troubled states. Maryland, Ohio, Delaware and Washington, DC, all in or near COVID-19.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, said the US had seen an “increase” in new cases, now exceeding 400,000 cases a day, and hospitalizations.

“We are in the middle of a very serious operation,” he said on Monday. “The number of cases we have seen has never happened, beyond what we have seen before.”

This trend comes at a time when Omicron species appear to be more contagious than in the past, but may be more dangerous than Delta. And the recent disruption of schooling has left many parents with little choice in the matter of child care – adding to the growing turmoil in the early days of 2022.

“There are a lot of COVIDs out there … it will be difficult,” said Michelle Smith McDonald, director of communications and public affairs at the Alameda County Office of Education.

In New Jersey, which has seen some of the highest threats to any state in recent weeks, many urban areas have set up classrooms for the new year, including Newark, with about 38,000 students.

In the state of Wisconsin, Milwaukee public schools announced Sunday that more than 70,000 of its students have rescheduled tuition Tuesday due to rising COVID infections among workers. in Ohio, Cleveland schools have also gone too far, while Detroit, Michigan banned classes until Wednesday.

U.S. officials say the country is now increasing the number of new cases of 400,000 COVID-19 cases per day, and hospitals are also. [Jeenah Moon/Reuters]

Some schools are using the trial to try to prevent further delays. In Washington, DC, all staff and 51,000 public school students are required to post a negative result on the state page before coming to class Wednesday. Parents can take running tests at their school or use their own.

Similar experiments are taking place in California, which has promised to provide free home test kits to all its six million K-12 public school students.

New York City schools, the largest district in the country, reopened as planned on Monday but are also testing its nearly one million students. Instead of isolating the whole class if one person is infected with the virus, all students in the class are immediately tested at home for use in the next seven days.

All the consequences of Omicron’s operation in the country’s school districts will not be clear until next week. Parents and caregivers alike are struggling to adapt to the changing technology and see the number of co-workers and older students who should be considered vaccinated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the use of a third dose of Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines for children between the ages of 12 and 15, reducing the shooting time by one month to five months after the first dose.