Schoolchildren without a mask at a school in Bilbao on April 25. / Ainhoa Górriz The Ministry of Health approves allowing all schoolchildren to interact and eliminates interpersonal distance in dining rooms After two years of restrictions, schools will leave the pandemic behind this year after the Government approved this Friday to end the limitations that still remained in force in the classrooms and in the canteens. The Public Health Commission, in which representatives of the Ministry of Health and the autonomous communities participate, has updated the document ‘Prevention, hygiene and health promotion measures against covid-19 for educational centers’, which in its New wording means the arrival of the new normality in the classroom. Thus, in the return to school next week, all school groups (preschool, primary, special education, ESO, FP and high school) will now be able to interact in any situation and physical space. Nor will it be necessary to keep the distance in the dining rooms, where interpersonal security measures were still kept, and Health also eliminates the recommendation to maintain interpersonal distance and to organize breakfast or snack in morning or extracurricular activities by groups of stable coexistence. The obligation to intensify cleaning in schools also ends, and now, sanitization “is carried out in the usual terms for the educational field,” according to the new protocol. The text does maintain the recommendation of natural and cross ventilation in classes, but establishes that as long as the epidemiological situation allows it, “the need for it to be permanent is eliminated, and it is recommended to ventilate several times a day, between classes, adapting the time to the characteristics of the classroom. In addition, the recommendation that schoolchildren be vaccinated continues. The anticovid measures in schools had been progressively relaxed during the past year, and even on April 20, as happened in all interiors, the obligation to wear the mask inside the classrooms ended.