The Department of Education said Tuesday that coronavirus-related absences won’t impact competitive school applications — but parents ripped the confusing new policy as a murky mess.

“In our schools, it’s health and safety first,” the DOE posted. “#Coronavirus-related absences will not impact current applications to middle or high schools.”

Attendance is used as an admissions metric to screened schools and skittish parents have been calling for the DOE to modify its absence policy in light of the coronavirus threat.

Community Education Council 2 member Eric Goldberg blasted the DOE’s lack of specificity Tuesday and questioned how the agency would be able to reliably track coronavirus-specific cases.

“How will they determine which absences are corona-related?” he told The Post. “This also implicitly states that if you keep a child home with seasonal flu or cold, their admissions will be impacted. I suggest DOE think this through a bit more.”

One parent posted on Twitter that she kept her child home Tuesday as a precaution but speculated that others were sending their sniffling kids to class to avoid marring their attendance.

“How many are sending sick kids to school out of fear of absence penalty?” she wrote.

A faction of parents have been pushing in recent years to scrap attendance as an admissions metric entirely, arguing that the policy compels parents to send ill kids to school.

They also argue that most children rely on their parents and the MTA to get to class and that they should not be penalized for tardiness or absence.

“Doctors, public health officials, even the DOE itself says to keep your sick kid home, but DOE is so fixated on assessing and sorting children, it can’t clear up the policy,” Goldberg said.

The DOE did not immediately say how it would determine if an absence relates to the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, parents across the city said they were becoming increasingly nervous about the coronavirus threat with its local presence now confirmed.

Parent Uri Pinkhaso, who has a child at PS 178 in Queens, called on the DOE to shutter her school until the coronavirus threat can be properly assessed.

“If I had my way, the school would be closed for at least a month until they figure out what they are going to do,” she said. “This is not a joke. I would prefer that my kid stay to home.”

Phonz Reyes, a parent of a child at PS 19 in Manhattan, said he didn’t know how to address the issue with his jittery son.

“As a parent, our kids expect us to know everything, and my son asks me a lot of questions about this virus,” he said. “So it’s a bit unsettling because no one really knows everything about this virus.”

Other parents said they were not overly concerned about sending their kids to school and were taking basic precautions.

“To me it’s like the flu, same symptoms as the flu, so for us, no, we’re not at all concerned about it,” said Bharatt Sukhra, a parent at PS 10 in Park Slope. “We had the Zika virus and all these different viruses every year, so no, we’re not concerned.”

Ashley Nachimow, a PS 6 parent on the Upper East Side, said attendance should simply be tossed completely as an admissions criteria — coronavirus-related or not.

“When kids get an absence, it affects their chances to get into a competitive middle school,” she said. “It’s a ridiculous thing that a sickness that causes an absence affects your child this way. Kids get sick.”

Additional reporting by Jacob Henry