[Curnow:] So in Hong Kong, many students are going back to school for the first time in four months. Students are having to come to terms I suppose the teachers, too with new realities in the classrooms. That includes social distancing, masks and many, many new rules. Kristie Lu Stout shows us what it's like now.
[Kristie Lu Stout, Cnn International Correspondent:] Familiar feelings for 11-year-old Hanna on her first day back at school.
[Unidentified Female:] social distance learning.
[Stout:] Sorry to say good-bye to her mom, excited to see the other kids and get back to doing well in class. But it's not summer break or Christmas holidays that she's had away from her teachers. Hanna's school is reopening after a pandemic shut it down.
[Hanna, Student:] I'm very excited, but I'm annoyed that we have to wear a mask all day.
[Stout:] Despite its border with mainland China, Hong Kong has come through the pandemic relatively unscathed. Like other parts of the world, social distance has been the watch word. But here, there have been just over 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in four known deaths. When Hanna's school reopened, the territory had not recorded a case for over a week.
[Hanna:] The hardest part was keeping one meter away, and, like, every time you leave the room and come back in, you have to put hand sanitizer on. And some people are forgetting.
[Stout:] Students here at Hong Kong's peak school are finishing up their first week back in this brave new world of socially distanced learning. And this is what a lunchroom looks like in this type of pandemic. Once lunch begins, students will be spaced 1.5 meters apart, facing the same direction. It's the one time in the entire school day when they're allowed to take off their masks.
[Unidentified Male:] And just sit where you are.
[Stout:] New school rules are strict. P.E. class turns a team sport, hockey, into individual practice. The kids wipe down their sticks. There is no sharing of water bottles. Classes are separated, half in one room, half and another. The teacher uses Zoom to be in two places at once. The toughest part is to ask kids to stay apart from one another, that according to Principal Bill Garnett, but anything to start getting things back to normal.
[Bill Garnett, Hong Kong School Principal:] Communities across Hong Kong have been waiting to have the children return, and to have them turn up on the bus and walk through the gates on Monday morning was some amazing feeling. To see they've all got masks on, but you could see the smiles. You could see in their cheeks and you could see in their eyes. Everyone is just elated to be back.
[Stout:] But being back means bringing the worries of the world into the classroom. Some of these kids have been cooped up in notoriously small Hong Kong apartments since January, when schools decided not to return after the Chinese new year break.
[Garnett:] We're confident that we've reduced the risk. You cannot eliminate the risk, and we made that point to the parents, that we've done everything we can to reduce the risk. But you know, year ones, 5-year-olds, who want to going to want to hold hands when they arrive at school. So it's a bit of mitigating that risk but not we can't eliminate it.
[Stout:] The question is, will school ever be how it was before COVID-19 hit, here at Hong Kong or anywhere?
[Garnett:] Hong Kong, as a city, this is an opportunity to really show the rest of the world that you can get through this. That we are leading the way. And we can demonstrate that this is something we can do. It is possible. We can keep the children safe, and we can have them in school.
[Stout:] Parents around the world wait anxiously in hope that their kids can go back to class, too, and like Hanna's school, the lessons of COVID-19 will keep them safe when they do. Kristie Lu Stout, CNN, Hong Kong.
[Curnow:] Well, you're watching CNN. Still to come, museums are looking at ways to remember the coronavirus pandemic for future generations. We look at how they plan to do it and what items they want to display.