PANDÈMIA

Jacket on during class time in order to mitigate covid

Ventilation is key to preventing infection, but it does not prevent the cold of winter

Cesc Maideu
4 min
Anorac a l’aula per pal·liar el covid

BarcelonaCarla Casalprim is 11 years old, and she gets up every day at 8 in the morning. After breakfast and brushing her teeth, she opens the door of her house and a chill runs down her body. "It's freezing", she says. Shee is from Sant Joan de les Abadesses, a village in the Ripollès region that is almost 800 metres above sea level and where, if in the early morning during the winter season the thermometer reads more than 0 degrees, it is not cold that day. Before leaving the house, Carla takes her beloved scooter, which accompanies her everywhere. Just by opening the door, Abril, one of her best friends, is already waiting for her, also with the scooter. "On the way I see frosty cars, there are even colleagues whose eyelashes freeze", she explains. The whole class arrives at school on a scooter, and perhaps the freezing occurs because some of them are speeding. Once inside the school Escola Mestre Andreu, Carla still takes a while to take her jacket off because she says that "it's not as cold as it is outside, but it's not cold enough to wear a sweatshirt either, especially now that winter has come".

Despite the low temperatures in Sant Joan de les Abadesses, the principal of Carla's school, Miquel Marcé, explains that their windows are always a little open. "We try to keep the air flowing", he explains. The cold that comes in through the windows is compensated for by setting the heating very high: "This can be seen in the bill that comes at the end of the month". Marcé explains that sometimes there are "students who complain about the cold", but that in general it is possible to follow classes in a normal way.

The protocol of the Catalan Education Department to achieve good ventilation of the classrooms and thus eliminate the possibility of contagion is to "open the doors and windows with a minimum opening of 20 cm between 10 and 15 minutes every school hour". Even so, the Education Department recommends, if possible, keeping the windows permanently open, which is a recommendation followed by most schools.

Between the fog and the cold

The inhabitants of Torelló, as in most villages in the region of Osona, many mornings wake up to a low fog covering their roofs. "Between the dampness of the fog and the cold, there are days when the students wear a jacket to class", Raquel Hinojo, the school's principal, explains, and adds that this causes them to have "mobility problems when taking notes". She insists, however, that it is "necessary for safety reasons". She points out that after playtime, "when they've already run", no one notices the cold. In the morning, at the Escola Sagrats Cors they use the same tactic as in Sant Joan de les Abadesses: high heating. However, using it more than necessary has also taken its toll, since two weeks ago "the heating system had enough". "We went on for a few days without radiators. After that, now we can't say it's cold in class anymore", she says jokingly.

The temperature in the classroom on cold days is not "pleasant" either, since, as Hinojo points out, when the temperatures inside the classrooms drop there are between 12 and 14 degrees. This is less than the minimum health and safety regulations for the workplace state, which stands between 17 and 27 degrees Celsius. In fact, this irregularity could end up in court, since Thursday the CCOO union accused the Education Department of violating the regulations on weather conditions in schools and threatened to go to court. USTEC-STEs - the biggest union of state school teachers - also demanded an end to the cold in the classrooms and asked Education to buy air renovators for schools.

Blanket in school

In the absence of purifiers, in Ontinyent, near Alicante, they have devised their own system of protection from the cold in the classrooms: the mantaescola (schoolblanket). As its name suggests, it is a blanket with sleeves that students of all ages wear so that they do not get cold when the windows are open. "One day the Education Councillor went to visit a school and he was cold. From there on we asked a local textile company if they could make a blanket for the children to wear", explains Mélani Revert, of the Ontinyent City Council. The blanket can no longer be seen only in this village of the Vall d'Albaida, since they are starting to export it to Andalusia, Galicia and even France.

In Barcelona the mantaescola has not yet arrived, although in the La Caixa School, in the Sant Martí district, some teachers would need it. "We teachers are colder here than the children, they would go all day in short sleeves", explains Gemma Jové, the school's principal. She adds that in Barcelona it's not as cold as it is in the Pyrenees and that few children "complain about the temperature". Even so, during the coldest days she explains that on the side of the school where the sun is not shining, "you see some teachers and some students wearing jackets". In any case, she admits that "prevention and care of anti-covid measures is the priority".

It seems that being cold is a must to avoid the coronavirus. This is the opinion of Valentí Pineda, president of the Catalan Society of Paediatrics, who states that ventilation "is key so that the aerosols do not concentrate in the environment". He concludes that "having a cold is always better than having covid".

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