Omicron thins out classrooms in US

The United States is seeing a nationwide drop in the number of students attending classes as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 surges, causing students and staff to stay away.

Most of the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools are open, but each day attendance gets lower for some schools as Omicron takes its toll and anxious parents keep their children home to avoid the highly transmissible variant.

New York City's public school district, the nation's largest, saw overall attendance fall below 70 percent when classes resumed last week after the holidays, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Before the pandemic, the average attendance in the school district was more than 90 percent.

At one high school in the city's Brooklyn Borough, hundreds of students were sent to the auditorium after about 50 teachers called out sick, and the school couldn't find enough substitutes.

At another school in the Bronx, 5 out of 100 senior students showed up in class. The school had to switch to "Zoom in a room" with students on devices in largely empty classrooms, Chalkbeat New York reported.

"There's this idea that schools are open and learning is happening, but in every single one of those you're dealing with people who are sick," Jeremy Ehrlich, a teacher at the Bronx's New World High School, told Chalkbeat New York, a news outlet.

Far more students and staff have reported testing positive for the coronavirus since Dec 24 than during the rest of the school year combined, health officials said. On Tuesday alone, nearly 7,500 students and 1,259 staff members reported testing positive, according to the New York City Education Department.

On the other side of the country, Aaron Hernandez, a junior at Milpitas High School in California, told CBS News: "The most that I've had in any of my classes was just two. It was me and another kid."

A shortage of COVID-19 tests is also playing a part in the low attendance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said COVID-19 testing should be offered for students or teachers and staff at least once every week when community transmission happens.

Additional tests

The administration of US President Joe Biden on Wednesday promised to provide an additional 10 million COVID-19 tests a month to schools and students to keep classrooms open. That is on top of more than $10 billion for school-based tests authorized in the COVID-19 relief law and about $130 billion earmarked in that law to keep children in school.

Increasing the school test supply will likely be too late for many trying to safely navigate the Omicron surge, which is already showing signs of cresting, The Associated Press reported.

In some large urban districts, schools are struggling to get their students tested. New York's schools announced last week that they were doubling participation in their regular surveillance testing. But union officials noted that at the expanded level, the optional screenings covered only 20 percent of the district's students at most, The New York Times reported.

Just over 17 percent of children aged from 5 to 11 were fully vaccinated as of Tuesday, more than two months after shots for the age group became available, officials said.

In France, half of schools closed on Thursday as up to three-quarters of teachers walked out, pushing back against the government after three changes of COVID-19 rules for classrooms in the space of a week.

The strike "demonstrates the growing despair in schools", the largest teachers' union Snuipp-FSU said in a Tuesday statement announcing the strike.

Agencies contributed to this story.