COVID-19 And Rethinking The Shutdown Of Our Primary Schools

If there is one thing we know for sure about the Coronavirus pandemic it's that we don't much for sure about the Coronavirus pandemic.  Models have been wrong, adjusted and proven wrong again.  Politics seem to have leaked into every nook, cranny and recommendation for mitigation.  The blame game is raging and businesses and people are going broke. 26 million American have lost their jobs.  Meanwhile thousand are dying and we don't even know if the numbers of deaths compared to the number of infections is significantly statistically worse than the annual flu and worth all the financial pain we are inflicting on ourselves.  Experts give contradictory advice - all of which results in fear and frustration!

And what about the kids?

Well, we've shut their schools and locked them down in order to keep them safe.  But was the the right thing to do?  Studies from around the world on both sides of equator now seem to indicate what we are doing might be the last thing we should..

An article from The Conversation online focusing on discoveries in Australia suggest that for some yet unknown reason, kids are different when it comes to the Coronavirus.

In fact the authors suggest Five Reason Kids Should Go Back To School. Here's one:

Children rarely get severely ill from COVID-19

"Data from around the world and Australia have confirmed children very rarely require hospitalization, and generally only experience mild symptoms, when infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Deaths in children due to COVID-19 are incredibly rare. Very few children globally have been confirmed to have died from the virus (around 20 by our calculations), in comparison to more than 200,000 overall deaths.

Many parents have worried their kids’ friends could be infected with the virus without showing symptoms. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. A study in Iceland showed children without symptoms were not detected to have COVID-19. No child below ten years of age without symptoms was found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 in this study."

The rest of the article and the other four points ares well worth reading and thinking about.  There are always lessons to be learned from crises and emergency including best practices and things to never do again,  The pandemic of 2020 has a lot of hard lessons that we may not know until months or years from now.  How best to serve our kids is one of them.