“It’s really rushing through right now,” says Christian Gündling. He is head of the Würzburg day care center at the Löwenbrücke. And he looks at the daily corona numbers with concern. For example, the: 1907, the most recent incidence among the zero to five year olds in Bavaria. Or the: According to the Ministry of Social Affairs, 1226 out of 10,200 daycare centers in the Free State reported a child or educator with an infection as of Monday. The situation is dynamic, but one thing remains: “The goal is to keep the facilities open,” emphasized Family Minister Carolin Trautner once again a week ago.
This is currently the case with a few exceptions. According to the ministry, 49 daycare centers are currently completely closed, and 763 are partially closed. Anyone who talks to Gerlinde Becke about this gets the impression that there will hardly be many more closures. “The government could have saved itself this regulation,” says the head of the Mouse Paradise daycare center in Himmelkron in the Kulmbach district about the decision, according to which the health department is no longer responsible for ordering a closure, but the carrier. Only when more than a fifth of the children in a group are infected can they be sent home as a lump sum.
“I will have all groups open in the next few months, no matter what comes up,” says Becke. Before enough children were infected for the 20 percent mark, the first returned. Waiting for the mark to be reached means “that outbreaks are noticed far too late and most people will become infected with this wave,” said Gerd Schnellinger, deputy state chairman of the Education and Science Union. And Christian Gündling from Würzburg criticizes that at this threshold “sick leave in the staff is completely ignored”. In the mouse paradise at Gerlinde Becke, for example, seven out of 14 employees were sick last week, two of them with Corona. “The situation is getting more and more difficult,” she says.
The Ministry of Social Affairs sees things differently. “We are currently not receiving any problem reports from the operating permit authorities that educational staff are absent on a large scale and that care is affected to a significant extent due to the pandemic,” said a spokesman.
“The teams are at the limit”
A perception that is not shared everywhere. “Because of increasing staff shortages, the teams are at the limit,” says Maria Magdalena Hellfritsch, managing director of the “Association of Catholic Daycare Centers Bavaria eV”, which describes itself as “the voice for children” – a self-attribution that cannot be completely dismissed out of hand : In Bavaria, around 197,000 girls and boys currently attend one of the around 2,770 day-care centers that its members are responsible for. The association is also important as an employer: around 33,000 pedagogical specialists and supplementary staff are employed under its roof. Which, according to its own statements, is the largest interest group for providers of day-care centers in Bavaria. And in this function he is trying to get his voice heard in politics: The association is demanding that daycare children and educational staff be included in the planned priority group for PCR tests. “Since PCR tests are the safest, this is the best way to keep daycare centers open,” says Hellfritsch. Because in practice, the current test strategy is experienced as insufficient. “Doing quick tests is like tossing a coin,” says the Würzburg Gündling.
According to Hellfritsch, the association’s managing director, politicians have gradually adapted and improved the test strategy in the daycare centers over the past two years. However, the problem now is that there is not enough laboratory capacity to evaluate all the tests. That’s why you have to give preference to daycare children. Because the little ones could still not be protected from the corona virus by masks or vaccination. So in order to keep the daycare centers open for as long as possible, which the association wants, you also have to ensure the highest possible level of safety for children and staff in the facilities.