NEW YORK, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- Due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has lasted eight months, only one in four students of New York City public schools have returned to classrooms, and the remainder has two weeks left to decide if they will go back.
About 283,000 of New York City's 1.1 million public school children have returned to classrooms since school buildings reopened in late September. Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that parents would have until Nov. 15 to decide whether to enroll their children in hybrid learning, a mixture of in-person and remote instruction, for the remainder of the school year.
The city had originally promised parents they could opt into the hybrid program every few months. But the mayor changed the rules because about only a quarter of the district's 1.1 million students have shown up for in-person classes since September, far fewer than predicted. That has made it difficult for the city to know how to allocate teachers, The New York Times on Tuesday quoted the mayor as saying.
This is a choice particularly fraught in New York City, once a global epicenter of the virus and now one of the few large urban districts in the United States to offer any classroom instruction, said the paper.
New York state's COVID-19 test positivity rate was lately ranked the second lowest in the United States, at 1.39 percent, right after Maine with 0.77 percent and before New Hampshire with 1.5 percent, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
However, as of Tuesday noon, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University reported 33,539 coronavirus deaths in New York state, the worst in the country. Enditem
