MOSCOW, March 24. /TASS/. More than 80% of secondary schools in Russian have been closed for vacations in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The rest continue classes, Russia’s ministry of education said on Tuesday.

"According to the statistics we update daily, the overwhelming majority of schools stopped classes and began vacations as of the beginning of the week. There are 83.5% of such schools. As many as 16.5% of schools continue classes with the use of distance learning technologies (8.4%) or in a regular format (8.1%)," the ministry cited its head, Sergei Kravtsov.

The minister stressed that strict sanitary norms are being observed in those schools that continue classes in a regular regime. "The regions strictly observe healthcare norms and the Ministry of Education keeps a close eye on that. All corresponding instructions have been referred to territorial education management bodies," he added.

On March 14, the Russian ministry of education recommended its regional structures to shift schools to distance learning amid coronavirus infection spread threats. On March 18, Minister of Education Sergei Kravtsov announced that this year’s spring vacations at secondary schools in Russia would begin from March 23 to last to April 12. He also promised that efforts would be taken to provide possibilities for distance learning.

A pneumonia outbreak caused by the COVID-19 virus (previously known as 2019-nCoV) was reported in China’s city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center with a population of 12 million, in late December 2019. Cases of the new coronavirus have also been reported from more than 150 countries and territories, including Russia, which by now has 438 cases, with 17 patients having recovered. The World Health Organization says that the novel coronavirus cases across the globe have exceeded 350,000, with about 16,000 deaths. The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially described the situation with the novel coronavirus as a pandemic.