Acting Chief Medical Officer Dr Ronan Glynn has said that NPHET expects and hopes, from a public health perspective, that the vast majority of older children in primary schools should be maintaining a distance of one metre between each other.
He was responding to a question from Sinn Féin's Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire at today's Covid-19 committee hearing as to whether it was safe for a school to reopen if it cannot achieve social distancing.
Dr Glynn said that it was accepted internationally that social distancing for younger children was impracticable, and so its absence should not prevent a school from reopening.
However, he said that the situation was different for older children in primary school, and for those in secondary school. A