SOUTH Africa has delayed the start to its new school year by two weeks to February 15, in order to prevent schools becoming transmission centres for COVID-19, as new cases have hovered around 20,000 a day for the past week. School was out for about a third of last year when South Africa was in the grip of its first wave of coronavirus infections. The closures widened an already stark educational divide between elite schools that easily shifted classes online and the rest with little or no capacity for digital learning. "CEM (council of education ministers) took this difficult decision,…