Minister Bianchi, are you opening the data on coronavirus infections at school this year?

Minister Bianchi

Wired appeals to the Minister of Education so that information on the spread of Covid-19 among students, teachers and school staff becomes open data immediately

(Photo by Matteo Nardone / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images) With the sole exception of Puglia and Calabria, which will reopen on Monday 20 September, Italy is back to school. And, even if the contagion curve has been decreasing for several days now, the fear is that the return to the banks is a harbinger of new outbreaks. It has already happened, for example, in Trentino. For this reason, Wired appeals to Minister Patrizio Bianchi so that the numbers on school infections are made available as open data.

The role of the school in spreading the coronaviru s has been talked about a lot in recent months. Of its centrality in every society it is superfluous to say, but it would be enough to remember how teachers were one of the categories to which the vaccine was offered as a priority to reaffirm it.

Last year it was necessary to resort to a request for access to public documents to discover that in the first month and a half of school there were 65 thousand cases of positivity among teachers, students and school staff. Numbers that the then Minister of Education Lucia Azzolina branded as "a blunder", although they came from the ministry that she herself led and commissioned to collect.

Now that the minister, government and majority have changed, Wired appeals to those who lead the institutions so that the data relating to the infections of students and teachers are disseminated in an open format. As is already the case for infections among the general population and for vaccinations.

The Higher Institute of Health announced in recent days a plan for monitoring the circulation of the coronavirus in primary and lower secondary schools. The document does not, however, clarify whether a publication of the data collected is expected.

Last year, the then minister Azzolina asked the teachers to collect the data and transfer them to the ministry. You request that you do not seem to have been confirmed by the new holder of the Miur. The local health companies, which notify the preventive quarantine measures for the classes in which a positive has been found, however, are aware of the infections. In short, the data are there, as well as the skills to collect and publish them. And also the political will, at least according to what was stated by the Prime Minister Mario Draghi, obtaining the confidence in the Senate. Here at Wired we are waiting confidently.


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Topics

Coronavirus School start 2021 Coronavirus numbers Open data School globalData.fldTopic = "Coronavirus, School start 2021, Coronavirus numbers, Open data, School"

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