Wallonia

In Wallonia (Southern part of Belgium), universities are already back to only giving online classes, schools will be closed two additional days after the Autumn holidays (so November 2-11), and secondary schools (12-18 years-old children) will be virtual for the 3 days before the Autumn holidays (so October 28-30). The reason? The exploding number of COVID-19 cases in schools. In Wallonia, education is in the hands of the French-speaking Community (along with Brussels) but its statistics department doesn’t seem to provide public data on COVID-19. For that, we have to look at ONE (roughly: " Office for births and infancy") that communicate weekly numbers of cases and quarantines in children in schools via press releases (forcing us to parse PDFs but it’s better than no data). ...

Recently (I’m writing this on October 20), the (new) Belgian government decided to apply more stringent prophylaxis measures to contain COVID-19. One of the controversial measure is to close bars and restaurants for a month. Unfortunately, in a way, at approximately the same time, AVIQ released its latest poll on COVID-19 clusters in Wallonia ( AVIQ is the Walloon agency for well-being, health, handicap and family). I wrote it was unfortunate because I read and heard several people who criticized the closing of bars and restaurants by citing this poll. But this poll cannot answer in favor or against this closure; it doesn’t look at that … ...