TOMSK, Jan 30 – RIA Tomsk. Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) will help catch up missed classes for students – citizens of China who are on vacation and can’t return to the beginning of the semester; there are about 70 such students, representative of the university’s press service told RIA Tomsk answering about the consequences of closing the Russian border in the Far East.
It was previously reported that the first outbreak of pneumonia caused by a new type of coronavirus was recorded in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of December 2019. According to Izvestia with reference to Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Well-Being (Rospotrebnadzor), as on January 29, 5999 cases were registered in China, 132 people died. Also, cases have been recorded in Australia, South Korea, Nepal, Malaysia, Japan, the United States, France, Canada and the UAE.
According to TASS on Thursday, on January 30, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed an order to close the Russian border in the Far East as one of the measures for the non-proliferation of coronavirus.
"Today, about 300 students from China study at Tomsk Polytechnic University. According to the university, about 70 of them spend their holidays at home ... With each student who, due to the situation associated with the spread of coronavirus in China, will not be able to return to Tomsk by the beginning of the semester, the issue will be resolved individually", – the agency’s interlocutor said.
He added that it will be possible to catch up for missed classes with the help of an individual study schedule or with the help of academic leave for six months – everything will depend on the volume of missed classes.
As follows from the official order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation “On measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus infection”, posted on Thursday on the website of the ministry, founders of the higher education institutions are advised to extend or provide Chinese students who are currently at home with vacations until March 2, 2020, and also consider the possibility of their distance learning.It was also previously reported that the virus can be transmitted through the respiratory tract, like acute respiratory infection. Sanitary and quarantine control in the Tomsk region due to the threat of the spread of coronavirus is carried out only at the air border – that is, at the airport of Tomsk. The regional department of Rospotrebnadzor instructed Tomsk doctors to monitor the status of university students returning after the holidays from China, who could catch a coronavirus.