Illustrative stock photo (source: TASR)
Schools will remain open under the lockdown, which starts on November 25 at midnight.
Students and the adults accompanying them are exempt from the curfew when travelling to and from school between 5:00 and 20:00.
Schools will remain open despite the original proposal of the group of experts who advise the Health Ministry, who wanted to keep only kindergartens and the first four grades of primary schools open. All other grades and universities were supposed to stay closed until December 3.
The proposal was blocked by the junior coalition party Freedom and Solidarity (SaS).
“Schools will be closed as the very last resort. We insist on them being open,” said SaS chair and Economy Minister Richard Sulík, as quoted by the TASR newswire.
Still, the party supported the idea of mandatory testing at schools. The Education Ministry wrote on Facebook that nearly 400,000 schoolchildren test at Slovak schools every week. Last week, the share of positive tests was 1.6 percent.
