The number of students absent due to COVID-19 in schools has dropped by 30% over the past two weeks, but non-pandemic absences are on the rise.
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According to Ministry of Education data obtained by The newspaper2,801 students were at home as of 1er November due to COVID-19, i.e. 0.22% of all students in the Quebec school network.
This is a significant drop compared to the same data collected two weeks earlier, when 3,942 students were absent due to the coronavirus on October 12.
By comparison, at the height of the Omicron tidal wave in early February, 65,000 students were home due to COVID-19, a number that had dropped to around 3,000 by June.
This drop can be explained by the fact that 90% of children have already contracted the virus, said Thursday the national director of public health, Luc Boileau, in a press briefing.
“We are in a period of calm which is excellent, but nothing allows us to believe that winter will be like autumn, even if we hope so”, affirms for his part the virologist Benoit Barbeau .
Other Viruses Circulating
The number of students absent for reasons unrelated to COVID-19, however, has been on the rise for two weeks, rising from 88,870 to 95,611 during this period.
Other types of viruses currently circulating are most likely responsible, says Dr.r Olivier Drouin, pediatrician at CHU Sainte-Justine.
The wave of respiratory syncytial virus “is hitting particularly hard right now,” he says, not to mention influenza, which has already started to circulate, “usual colds” and gastroenteritis.
“It’s a combination of all of this that is reflected in school absenteeism, in emergency room occupancy rates, in overflowing clinics. It’s a reflection of the amount of virus circulating in the community,” says Dr.r Drouin.
Over the past two years, children have been less exposed to respiratory viruses because of health measures, which explains why their immune response is weaker, adds Benoit Barbeau. “They are more prone to being infected and that creates a snowball effect,” he explains.
Unlike last year, data on the number of student absences related or not to COVID-19 are no longer available online. The Ministry of Education indicates that “the presence of minimum sanitary measures and the current situation do not require the publication of data on absenteeism”.
These figures are first collected for the public health authorities, specifies its spokesperson, Bryan St-Louis.
With the collaboration of Jean-François Racine