SEOUL– More than 158,000 kindergartners and teenagers did not go to school on the first day of the new spring semester due to possible COVID-19 infections, the education ministry said Thursday.

A total of 5.86 million kindergartners and elementary, middle and high school students across the country have been advised to take rapid antigen tests and enter the results on the designated self-check mobile application before attending in-person classes on Wednesday.

About 4.91 million students, or 83.7 percent of the total, followed the instruction and 158,171 of them were told to stay home, according to the education ministry, as they said they have potential virus symptoms, or received positive test results for COVID-19 of themselves or their families, or are waiting for polymerase chain reaction test results of themselves or their families.

The number accounted for 2.69 percent of all students.

Of those who stayed home on the first day of school, the number of elementary school students was the highest at 89,818, followed by middle school students at 33,488, high school students and 26,895 and kindergartners at 7,400.

Education Vice Minister Jeong Jong-cheol asked students and parents to use the self-health monitoring application more actively, saying teachers have to check the virus situation of those who do not.

Many schools opted for full in-person classes as the new semester started under the education ministry’s four-tier attendance scheme, which recommends schools to not shift to full remote learning unless 3 percent of students test positive or 15 percent go into self-quarantine due to infections or close contact with patients.

Source: Yonhap News Agency