MEXICO CITY — Distance learning will begin for more than 30 million Mexican schoolchildren Aug. 24, but a return to classrooms will remain an uncertain goal, the country’s education secretary said Monday.
As outbreaks of new coronaviruses continued on Monday, Australia and the Philippines followed stricter blocking measures on the virus’s hot spots.
Mexican Secretary of Education Esteban Moctezuma Barragán and the leaders of the country’s largest television networks defined a plan to broadcast education on television.
Moctezuma said the dangers to face-to-face schooling remain too high. Officials fear that young people may be carriers of coronavirus, infecting their loved ones at home.
“We try to move on to the catepassries in person, but it’s neither imaginable nor safe,” Moctezuma said.
Students will not return to study rooms until the government’s edition of a gentle red to assess the threat of a pandemic is green.
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Mexico has reported more than 439,000 covid-19 infections and nearly 48,000 deaths.
Across Latin America, all education is provided online or on television as the pandemic continues to increase. School districts around the world are suffering from making this decision, knowing that for up to a maximum of students, there is no replacement for face-to-face teaching.
Moctezuma cited several countries that opened schools and had to close them while infections were spreading.
Students continue to attend schools in Nicaragua and academics are scheduled to return to study classrooms in Cuba on September 1. In Bolivia, the government announced on Sunday that it was ending the school year because it was to ensure free and universal schooling in a country where maximum rural areas do not have access to the Internet.
AUSTRALIA, PHILIPPINES
Victoria, Australia’s coronavirus access point, announced Monday that companies would shut down and shrink in an effort to curb the virus.
Victoria’s Prime Minister Daniel Andrews said non-central business would be from Wednesday night in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city.
The new restrictions followed Andrews on Sunday, signaling a crisis in Melbourne and introducing a night curfew for six weeks. Andrews predicted that the newer restrictions would generate 250,000 jobs.
Victoria announced on Monday 429 new infections and thirteen more deaths overnight. Health director Brett Sutton said the infection rate would continue at 400 or 500 new covid-19 instances, according to the new daily restrictions.
Industries that will have to close their on-site operations for six weeks come with maximum retail and production businesses.
In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is re-enusing a moderate closure in the capital and outlying provinces after medical teams called for resolution as coronavirus infections increase.
Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Monday that the city of Manila, the capital region of more than 12 million people, and five densely populated provinces would return to stricter quarantine restrictions for two weeks from today.
Public shipping will be prohibited and only one must-have will be allowed. Leaders of nearly 100 medical organizations held an online press convention on Saturday and warned that the fitness formula has been overcome by spikes in infection and may yield when fitness staff become ill or resigns from exhaustion and fear.
The number of covid-19 cases in the Philippines exceeded 106,000 on Monday, the time in Southeast Asia.
CRUISE EPIDEMIC
Also on Monday, a Norwegian cruise line stopped everything and apologized for procedural errors after an outbreak of coronavirus on an inflamed ship involving at least five passengers and 36 team members. The health government fears that the ship may also have spread the virus to dozens of towns and villages along Norway’s west coast.
Confirmed cases of MS Roald Amundsen raise new questions about the protection of all cruisers sending a pandemic, even as the devastated cruise sends lobbyists to the industry to resume navigation after the chaotic closure in March. In reaction to the outbreak, Norway closed its cruise ports on Monday for two weeks.
The hurtigruten cruise line was one of the first corporations to resume sending the pandemic, starting cruises to Norway from northern Germany in June with a single ship, and then added cruises in July in the Svalbard Arctic Archipelago.
The 41 MS Members Roald Amundsen who tested positive were admitted to the University Hospital of Northern Norway in Tromsoe, north of the Arctic Circle, where the ship has recently been docked. The cruise line said it had suspended the operation of the ship and two others, the MS Fridtjof Nansen and the MS Spitsbergen, indefinitely.
The information for this article was provided by Christopher Sherman, Jan M. Olsen, Jim Gomez, Colleen Barry, Angela Charlton, Dee-Ann Durbin, Kiko Rosario, Iya Forbes, Andrea Rodríguez, Carlos Valdez and the associated press staff.