Heavy Snow, Flu Force 380 Schools to Close

380 schools, accounting for about 18.2% of Georgia’s public schools, will be closed for next three days starting from January 27, the Ministry of Education said.

200 of them, mostly in western Georgia, have been closed because of heavy snow and 180 others were temporarily shut “to prevent spread of flu”, according to the Education Ministry.

Snow-related closures applied to 124 schools in the Black Sea region of Adjara, including to 27 schools in Batumi; 58 schools were closed for the same reason in western region of Guria; 13 schools in the eastern region of Kakheti, and 5 schools in Mtskheta-Mtianeti region.

The Education Ministry said that it has decided upon recommendation from the National Center for Disease Control to close for three days those 180 schools, among them 48 public schools in the capital city Tbilisi, where students’ absentee rate, mostly because of spread of flu, was over 20%.

There have been three death cases caused by the H1N1 virus and one death case caused by H3N2 virus in Georgia in January, according to the National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), which said that in all these cases the victims went to hospitals too late.

Amiran Gamkrelidze, head of the NCDC, said that as usually in January levels of flu activity increase and current rates suggest that “nothing out of ordinary is happening this January.”

“So there is no reason for panic as we are far from epidemic threshold,” he said.