What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Squamish parents and kids were preparing for back to school, many apprehensive about kids picking up COVID-19 and bringing it home to vulnerable relatives.
As back-to-school 2021 approaches, many are likely anxious about unvaccinated kids going to school and becoming sick with the Delta variant.
And while there’s no reason to panic — in the U.S., 22% of the most recent weekly reported cases were in children, and 0.2%-1.9% of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization, with less than 1% resulting in death, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics — there is reason to be concerned.
The BC COVID-19 Modelling Group, made up of math and infectious disease experts from Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria and UBC, has some dramatic predictions of total case counts — not just in kids, to be clear — we could expect if pandemic protocols stayed the same into fall.
Two weeks before Halloween, close to 12,000 positive cases per day in the province are predicted. By November, approximately 5,000 people would need to be hospitalized.
Hopefully, the reinstated mask mandate for indoors, which started Aug. 25, is likely going to help us avert this scenario.
But we can see from Australia and the U.S. that schools are the “new COVID battleground,” as a headline in Australia’s ABC News declared.
The BC union representing 45,000 public school teachers last week called for action.
“We are hearing from more concerned families than ever before in this pandemic. They’re worried that their children who are too young to be vaccinated might be going back to school without enough protections in place,” said BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) president Teri Mooring in a news release. “Things are most definitely not normal right now, so we can’t carry on as if they were.”
The union called for a mandatory mask mandate, (which was then announced by Dr. Bonnie Henry Tuesday) more widespread testing protocols and more transparency around data. The union would also like to see vaccination clinics in high schools to ensure all eligible have gotten both doses.
The BCTF also calls for a regional approach to school safety measures, emphasizing in the news release that “decisions must be informed by timely, transparent regional data and involve local stakeholders from the education and public health sectors.”
This is key.
Each school district should be able to morph and adapt to its regional situation. No cases in Squamish or the Sea to Sky? Great, we can loosen protocols. Cases spiking here? We can layer on more protocols.
But for this to work, we need granular data. We need to know weekly, if not daily, what the case count for Squamish is. Only seeing broad regional stats is not acceptable.
While it is commendable that moms spearheaded the BC School COVID Tracker page on Facebook, it is preposterous that they had to.
The health authority has to provide timely and regular updates for parents, teachers and the community (including media). The provincial ministry of health and Henry must demand this transparency for all communities.
The paternalistic attitude dressed up as privacy concerns didn’t work with COVID-19 last year, thus the Facebook tracker group was launched to fill in the gaps; the secrecy certainly isn’t going to work with the faster-moving Delta variant.
Information is power and that power needs to be in parents’ hands.
