Spokesperson for the provincial education department, Howard Ndaba, confirms the COVID-19 positive educators are from Sentraal and Fauna Primary schools in the city. Both schools will remain closed on Wednesday post the Tuesday public holiday, until all grade seven learners have been screened and tested and the buildings have been decontaminated.

This screening and testing process will occur at the school grounds where the provincial health department has already deployed mobile laboratories. Ndaba says they will continue to liaise with the health department to determine the way forward. All contacts will be traced, screened and tested.  He doesn’t confirm murmurs doing the rounds on social media that the teachers are reportedly friends and may have contracted the coronavirus from one another.

This development comes less than a week since a Grey College boarder tested positive for the coronavirus in Bloemfontein, resulting in nineteen fellow learners having to self-isolate for 14 days. The nineteen boys had been quarantined at a Bloemfontein guesthouse but threats by civil rights organisation, Afriforum, to have the Basic Education, Health and Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs departments (Cogta) interdicted for infringing on the parents’ rights to choose where their children should be quarantined, resulted in them being greenlit to self-isolate at home. The parents were reportedly unhappy with being informed their children “would be state property for 14 days”. Ndaba, however, declined to comment on allegations made by Afriforum, that the teenagers were placed in groups of three and four at the Bloemfontein guesthouse, making self-isolation difficult.

OFM News