The Gauteng education department is targeting 40 schools in all districts, with their main focus being Tshwane.
“In the meetings that we have held in the past few days, in which we are finalising our plans.
We have decided that we need to identify schools and we have already identified schools that can be visited.
"Out of those we are actually targeting 40 schools”, said Gauteng Education Spokesperson Steve Mabona.
The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) noted the spike in Covid-19 cases in Gauteng, more especially in the Tshwane region in the past few weeks.
Melanie Langeveldt of the City of Tshwane said the sharp increase in new confirmed Covid-19 cases could be due to the fact that residents became more relaxed during the level 1 lockdown based on the low daily confirmed cases observed at the time.
This contributed to a relaxed approach to social gatherings.
The department of education is concerned about year-end activities which could potentially become super spreader events.
The Department of Education has agreed that the department of health should lead the school’s vaccination program, this comes after the announcement that the next age group to be vaccinated is the 12 years and older.
The Gauteng education department is also working behind the scenes, planning around how they will implement the program.
As part of the Gauteng education schools vaccination plan, mobile units will be brought to the schools by health professionals as they are the ones leading this process.
“We are assisting them to avail space and to interact with the school community,” said Mabona.
With the emergence of the new variant, there’s no other relevant time to do this project.
Hence, 40 schools are targeted across the districts, mainly in Tshwane due to the increase in the number of infections.
