As I said on social media I find it very annoying when as a parent I have to got out of my way to clarify to some that parents who completely believe and trust science and medicine can send their kids to school for reasons that make sense under those conditions.
I hate that our current political climate seems to try and say our medical people are some how lying to us. Or that they are in political thrall because we hate the current govt. Why do people have to go all flat earth on this issue.
Parental concerns are valid, but as a diabetic who has asthma issues I want my child to at least graduate with the best grades possible. And in my daughter's case where I saw daily the affects of six months of no school, little contact with friends and peers and what that did to her psyche. Our children need the opportunity to thrive, for their health and mental welfare. I would like politicians especially to stop trying to score points on the back of my kids well being.
The literature on COVID transmission among children is mixed, and there’s also not a lot known about the effects on children. This means that there is uncertainty, and competent risk management means assuming that the level of risk is higher. That doesn’t mean keeping schools closed, but it means it’s quite reasonable to insist on the higher levels of mitigation that you’re dismissing as only necessary for nursing homes.
Your conclusion would make sense if the risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 was the only one that children faced in this scenario, and if there were unlimited public funds available to mitigate it. Neither are true. As Matt describes, we must face trade-offs involving health risks and make decisions about where best to distribute limited public resources.
I'm more interested in the former; therefore, let's say that Bill Gates offered up the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to replace the air filtration systems in every school across the land. Still, it would take months or years to do this. Meanwhile, your post seems to suggest that schools would be closed until this was done.
Public schools are a public good, which is why they exist and why we spend so much on them already. They educate, socialize, and develop children. They provide some children with their only reliable meal of the day, and others with 7 hours of calm and safety from chaotic and abusive homes.
Back to Matt's point about trade-off's: How far are we willing to let the high school graduation rate fall as borderline students don't engage online? How many instances of physical abuse will we tolerate as children and their abusive parents are stuck together at home for an extra 35 hours per week?
These are the types of other risk to be weighed for any scenario aside from reopening at full in-person capacity now. Serious ethical ones that can't be characterized as reckless or imbecile in good faith.
Frankly, in BC the public health authorities and school boards have been unwilling to require a mitigation as inexpensive and low impact as mandatory wearing of face masks when indoors. This isn’t about keeping schools closed, it’s about ensuring there are reasonably effective mitigations rather than hygiene theater and symbolic attempts at limiting social contact with cohorts of up to a hundred students.
Right. I can get behind that frustration. As I re-read our posts, I think I am in part guilty of linking what you wrote to some other arguments I have read recently to delay or severely restrict the opening of schools.
My top frustration with all of this is that after six months, we are just as fuzzy about any of the specific benefits and risks of the most invasive pandemic measures.
I admire Matt's courage to be skeptical about the government's messaging. With the kind of changes we've all seen to our lives, there must be innumerable unintended consequences to our health. Strikes me as odd that only a handful of physicians are willing to go on the record questioning them.
We have been living the precautionary principle for 6 months. How has it been working for us? I say, not that well. Mostly because precaution has morphed into paralyzing, overwhelming fear for some, which is especially bad when it infects our policy makers. It's really tough to make clear-headed, evidence-based decisions that affect a whole society when the only lens is fear. Depriving children of school is bad for society in so many ways: Primarily for the children who are our future [pardon the cliche] and need education to maximize their chances at a successful future; then for the parents who are the lifeblood of our economy and need their kids in school so they can earn a living; then for those parents who are also caring for the most vulnerable to bad outcomes from COVID-19 infection - the elderly in long term care and those in hospitals. I will stop here because these points should be sufficient to support the premise - that our society will perish if we don't overcome our fear and keep our schools open.
This isn’t a binary option of get kids back to school or keep them shut down due to fear. There are a range of things that can and should be done - mask mandates, widespread antibody-based testing, robust contact tracing, development of effective remote learning programs when needed, smaller learning cohorts to limit potential spread. The fact that these aren’t in place or in progress after 6 months of lockdown is attributable to managerial incompetence by the government. The fact is that there’s evidence COVID is not like other viruses,and can have long term health effects. Here’s an example of another study pointing to lingering heart damage in even mild cases: https://www.vancouverite.com/covid-19-can-damage-heart-muscle-researchers-say/
It’s pathetic to think that the answer to wasting 6 months is “well, we’ve tried nothing. Let’s just take the punch now, and keep our fingers crossed that we don’t generate a chronic health problem for the next generation.”
As I said on social media I find it very annoying when as a parent I have to got out of my way to clarify to some that parents who completely believe and trust science and medicine can send their kids to school for reasons that make sense under those conditions.
I hate that our current political climate seems to try and say our medical people are some how lying to us. Or that they are in political thrall because we hate the current govt. Why do people have to go all flat earth on this issue.
Parental concerns are valid, but as a diabetic who has asthma issues I want my child to at least graduate with the best grades possible. And in my daughter's case where I saw daily the affects of six months of no school, little contact with friends and peers and what that did to her psyche. Our children need the opportunity to thrive, for their health and mental welfare. I would like politicians especially to stop trying to score points on the back of my kids well being.
The literature on COVID transmission among children is mixed, and there’s also not a lot known about the effects on children. This means that there is uncertainty, and competent risk management means assuming that the level of risk is higher. That doesn’t mean keeping schools closed, but it means it’s quite reasonable to insist on the higher levels of mitigation that you’re dismissing as only necessary for nursing homes.
Your conclusion would make sense if the risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 was the only one that children faced in this scenario, and if there were unlimited public funds available to mitigate it. Neither are true. As Matt describes, we must face trade-offs involving health risks and make decisions about where best to distribute limited public resources.
I'm more interested in the former; therefore, let's say that Bill Gates offered up the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to replace the air filtration systems in every school across the land. Still, it would take months or years to do this. Meanwhile, your post seems to suggest that schools would be closed until this was done.
Public schools are a public good, which is why they exist and why we spend so much on them already. They educate, socialize, and develop children. They provide some children with their only reliable meal of the day, and others with 7 hours of calm and safety from chaotic and abusive homes.
Back to Matt's point about trade-off's: How far are we willing to let the high school graduation rate fall as borderline students don't engage online? How many instances of physical abuse will we tolerate as children and their abusive parents are stuck together at home for an extra 35 hours per week?
These are the types of other risk to be weighed for any scenario aside from reopening at full in-person capacity now. Serious ethical ones that can't be characterized as reckless or imbecile in good faith.
Frankly, in BC the public health authorities and school boards have been unwilling to require a mitigation as inexpensive and low impact as mandatory wearing of face masks when indoors. This isn’t about keeping schools closed, it’s about ensuring there are reasonably effective mitigations rather than hygiene theater and symbolic attempts at limiting social contact with cohorts of up to a hundred students.
Right. I can get behind that frustration. As I re-read our posts, I think I am in part guilty of linking what you wrote to some other arguments I have read recently to delay or severely restrict the opening of schools.
My top frustration with all of this is that after six months, we are just as fuzzy about any of the specific benefits and risks of the most invasive pandemic measures.
I admire Matt's courage to be skeptical about the government's messaging. With the kind of changes we've all seen to our lives, there must be innumerable unintended consequences to our health. Strikes me as odd that only a handful of physicians are willing to go on the record questioning them.
We have been living the precautionary principle for 6 months. How has it been working for us? I say, not that well. Mostly because precaution has morphed into paralyzing, overwhelming fear for some, which is especially bad when it infects our policy makers. It's really tough to make clear-headed, evidence-based decisions that affect a whole society when the only lens is fear. Depriving children of school is bad for society in so many ways: Primarily for the children who are our future [pardon the cliche] and need education to maximize their chances at a successful future; then for the parents who are the lifeblood of our economy and need their kids in school so they can earn a living; then for those parents who are also caring for the most vulnerable to bad outcomes from COVID-19 infection - the elderly in long term care and those in hospitals. I will stop here because these points should be sufficient to support the premise - that our society will perish if we don't overcome our fear and keep our schools open.
This isn’t a binary option of get kids back to school or keep them shut down due to fear. There are a range of things that can and should be done - mask mandates, widespread antibody-based testing, robust contact tracing, development of effective remote learning programs when needed, smaller learning cohorts to limit potential spread. The fact that these aren’t in place or in progress after 6 months of lockdown is attributable to managerial incompetence by the government. The fact is that there’s evidence COVID is not like other viruses,and can have long term health effects. Here’s an example of another study pointing to lingering heart damage in even mild cases: https://www.vancouverite.com/covid-19-can-damage-heart-muscle-researchers-say/
It’s pathetic to think that the answer to wasting 6 months is “well, we’ve tried nothing. Let’s just take the punch now, and keep our fingers crossed that we don’t generate a chronic health problem for the next generation.”
Loving this conversation, everybody!