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And what did Manzanero have to say about schools?  

Last night on the news, you heard Education Minister Patrick Faber say that at this time, it appears unlikely that schools will re-open before this current school year ends. He stressed that he was not willing to make that decision just yet, because he is still hopeful the students will get some of that in-class contact time that the pandemic has deprived them of. 

The problem is that there is still no finalized protocol on whether or not students will have to wear masks at school. And then, there is the set up of the classrooms, which don’t exactly allow for that 3 to 6 feet of social distancing between each student.

The Director of Health Services today spoke about the Ministry’s stance and input on a possible resumption of classes:

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, Director of Health Service
"We had a first discussion with the Ministry of Education CEO and other managers of the different management systems in the school last week Friday and there is one tomorrow afternoon, virtual session because there are many unknown as you reopen. For example, one of the topics I discuss with the Ministry of Education was what happens with the schools that in the Cayo area for example, that have a huge influx of people coming from Melchor and further along all the way up to Flores who come to school on a daily basis. I don't know that when the schools open whether that will be possible and I think we need to be able to inform the people on that side at this point in time, yesterday when I was in Corozal I found out that there are people who come from Chetumal also to school here but the numbers are about 10% of what comes across the Guatemala border. Again, I don't know that is going to be a possibility right now because we can't safeguard people that are coming in from outside. That's one of the topics discussed, the other is masks, whether we will be asking young children to wear a mask, one of the recommendations that come up on that day and again, this an involving process, was that children perhaps would be more likely and perhaps safer for them to use a face shield because that allows for a better breathing process and also it prevents young children from touching their face if they have a face shield, that's an option. We discussed that schools would need to have better hand washing stations, better cleaning of their bathroom facilities, the school calendar may change, we had toss out the idea of them opening in August or earlier because your entire system is thrown out because if we are thinking you are going to have bigger numbers towards the end of the year, then you might need to start earlier because you might need to close sooner and go through different cycles. We discussed about the idea of maybe only having key subjects being taught, having morning and afternoon groups, so that you only have half the population or half the population goes Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday the following week and you rotate that cycle. Again, this is us throwing out ideas to Ministry of Education, that's not going to be our call but we are trying to do this kind of guided by public health, how we can do that situation as move along."