School teachers may be catching COVID-19 at a higher rate than the rest of the adult population.
Schools notified the Education Ministry of about 1000 cases among their teaching staff in each of the past two weeks, which data analyst David Hood calculated to be a weekly rate of about 16 or 17 cases per 1000 teachers.
Hood said that compared to only about 11 cases a week for every 1000 adults in the 20-59 age group of the general population, according to Health Ministry figures.
Both sets of figures are subject to under-reporting and should be treated with caution, but teachers and principals told RNZ the numbers tallied with what they were seeing among their colleagues.
University of Otago epidemiologist Amanda Kvalsvig said the numbers needed further investigation.
"This new estimate is in line with anecdotal evidence that teaching is potentially becoming a high-risk occupation for COVID-19 infection. That's a concern not only for those teachers and their families: it raises a question about how the education system will cope if large numbers of staff feel unsafe in their workplace and leave the profession or have long COVID and can't work the long hours that teachers are expected to put in," Kvalsvig said.
"Schools have an incredibly difficult job of making decisions for their staff and students without key outbreak information that they need. If the infection risk for teachers is high they have a right to know that and they should expect urgent action from government to remedy the situation."
Post Primary Teachers Association president Melanie Webber said teachers were more likely to be exposed to the virus than other workers because they interacted with a lot more people each day.
"Particularly in secondary where a classroom teacher will be dealing with 150 students in a day, let alone the other students who are out and about. Add in that in a school context masks are strongly recommended whereas if you're in a retail environment for example they're required, and so it's having a real impact on numbers," she said.
Webber said schools could impose their own facemask mandates but they needed more leadership from the Education Ministry.
"We would like to see some clear discussion around when it is required and when it is not and more support and more support given to schools in enforcing this because while we say 'strongly recommended' what is happening in schools is often that means that students are not wearing masks," she said.
"A lot of schools feel like they will not be supported by the ministry if they ask their students to wear masks."
Educational Institute president Liam Rutherford said schools were doing what they could to minimise the spread of the coronavirus but they were up against a population that seemed increasingly more relaxed about the virus.
"What we're seeing in wider society is that people's attitudes and behaviours are shifting to post-COVID and it's actually our schools that are bearing the brunt of that because they're trying to hold the line around these provisions but culturally we are shifting away as a country from having those things in place."
Te Ao Marama School principal Tony Grey said his school had no cases of COVID until this year and already half the students and more than half its teachers had had the virus.
Grey said some of his teachers had caught the coronavirus for the second time and less than three months after their previous case.
"That makes it really challenging if this is something that is potentially going to recycle itself every few months," he said.
Grey said teachers were likely to encounter a range of illnesses because of their contact with children and now COVID had been added to the list of possible viruses.
"Most days there will be COVID here somewhere of course with either staff or parents or children that may not realise. There's a steady trickle of kids that come over to the sickbay and usually [with] the tell-tale symptoms of fever or maybe they're feeling nauseous. Unfortunately dare I say it, often they will phone in later and yes indeed they've tested positive," he said.
RNZ
