Pandemic: Family Minister wants regular corona tests for children

pandemic
Family Minister wants regular corona tests for children

According to Federal Minister for Family Affairs Anne Spiegel, children and young people should continue to be tested regularly for Corona.

She fully agrees with the recommendation of the Federal Government’s Council of Experts that schools, day-care centers and extracurricular educational, leisure and sports facilities for children and young people must remain open, said the Greens politician to the German Press Agency. “However, in order to protect them as best as possible from infection, regular and binding testing must continue.”

The President of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Karin Prien, had demanded a few days ago that testing in schools had to “end gradually”. “By the end of March at the latest, two tests a week will probably be enough,” said the CDU politician, who is Minister of Education in Schleswig-Holstein. The obligation to test must gradually become a “test option”.

requirements

In a statement published on Thursday evening, the Corona Expert Council called for the well-being of children in the pandemic to be given high priority. Children and young people are particularly vulnerable. The so-called secondary burden of illness caused by mental and physical illnesses, for example triggered by lockdown measures, stress in the family such as fear, illness, death or loss of livelihood, loss of social participation or planning security, is described as particularly serious. Children must be protected equally from infections and diseases as a result of the pandemic.

The committee took up an extremely important topic and rightly pointed out that society as a whole must focus its actions on dealing with children and young people responsibly during the pandemic, said Spiegel. “We owe it to the children and young people to improve the conditions for all young people to grow up healthy in the long term.” The statement gives important impetus that will be taken up.

The expert council called for the operation of schools, day-care centers and other facilities for children and young people to be made as safe as possible and for closure to be “considered at most as a last resort”. Access restrictions that exclude a large proportion of children and young people from attending age-appropriate leisure activities should be dropped at federal and state level, as far as the pandemic situation allows. “The current regulations for children and young people differ drastically and seemingly arbitrarily between the federal states.” The countries should make the rules uniform and based on the principle of maximum possible participation.

burden of disease in children

The experts explained that the disease burden of children and adolescents from an acute infection with the coronavirus is lower than that of adults. Nevertheless, children and adolescents, especially those with previous illnesses and risk factors, could also become seriously ill.

In addition to the acute illness, the inflammatory syndrome PIMS is observed in children and adolescents in rare cases several weeks after an infection, and some of those affected have to be treated in intensive care. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a total of around 700 PIMS cases have been reported in the register of the German Society for Pediatric Infectious Diseases from more than half of all German children’s hospitals. “The actual number will be higher due to acceptable underreporting.”

The experts called for both the primary and the secondary burden of disease to be scientifically recorded and evaluated “with specific consideration of children and adolescents”. In addition, they are calling for sustainable state support programs to compensate for the adverse effects of pandemic measures on children and young people.

dpa