Stop telling me my kids won't die of COVID. I know that. It's their grandma I'm worried about
I don't expect perfection. But it'd be nice to think that the government had at least made schools as safe as reasonable possible. They haven't.
We've been living in this pandemic for almost six months now, here in Toronto. It's astonishing how we keep having arguments about the wrong thing.
Early in the pandemic, I wrote a piece in the National Post about how the threat of COVID wasn't limited to the people it would kill. By then it was clear that the overall lethality was low and that it was primarily the elderly who were at risk of death. But I was horrified how many otherwise smart folks read a statistic or two and declared, "No death? No problem! Let's just open everything up again and all meet at the pub for wings!" That was insanely irresponsible thinking, because while COVID isn't good at killing young people, it's very good at making them sick. Sick enough to fill up and eventually overwhelm the hospitals if we weren’t careful. If that happens, we’d start losing people to treatable injuries and illnesses because the ICU bed they need to recover was occupied by a 40-something COVID patient who got complacent once he realized he wouldn’t die.
It's true. He won't. He'll live, after a few weeks on that precious ventilator.
There's a very similar vibe out there right now regarding the challenge of re-opening schools, with people looking at a few stats and declaring, hey, kids don't die, let's open 'em up! This is the same kind of narrow thinking that caused people to overlook the threat posed by COVID illnesses. Parents in a pandemic don’t have the luxury of only worrying about one thing at a time.
Dr. Matt Strauss wrote about this recently for The Line. He cited statistics that confirm that the odds of either of my young children dying of COVID are reassuringly low. He notes that a Canadian child is more likely to die in the car on the way to school from COVID they'd acquire in the classroom.
Strauss’s argument is valid as far as it goes, but it only addresses only a tiny sliver of the equation. My wife and I are both young, in our 30s, and generally healthy. We are comfortable with the risk sending the kids back poses to ourselves. But my children have grandparents. They even have a great-grandparent. They also have great aunts and uncles. Not all of these relatives are close at hand, or major parts of our lives. But some are. And sending kids back into school instantly destroys the social bubble we had created so that we could function as a family with low levels of risk. Once school starts, my septuagenarian mother-in-law, with chronic lung issues, is now at the mercy of the least responsible relative of any of my children's classmates.
In short, stop telling me that COVID isn't going to kill my kids. I know that. We've all known that for months. But we also know that kids can get infected and we believe they can transmit it to others. It's awesome (sincerely!) that my kids won't die of COVID, but they can sure as hell kill their grandmother. And the only way to avoid that is to cut out parts of our family from much of our lives. And that sucks, too.
Not every family is close (emotionally or geographically). But some families are both. Some of those families will accept the danger and continue life as normal. Most of them will be fine. Other families will put safety first and stop seeing each other. There's a huge emotional cost to that that is being ignored by policymakers and those who insist on portraying the concerns of parents as being solely about the danger their children face (or, more accurately, don’t).
Families are going to have to decide for themselves what they value. I offer no advice here (mainly because we haven't made our own decisions yet). But in the starkest of terms, the choice is this: I can send my children to school, which they will benefit immensely from, or I can maintain a somewhat normal life with my extended family with reasonable confidence that I am not putting them in danger. I can't do both of these things at once. And waving some Belgian mortality statistics at me doesn't change these facts.
I'm a realist. COVID is likely going to be with us for many years, and we'll find a way to carry on because we have to. The economic restart we depend on for our standard of living (and literal survival) requires schools to be open in some capacity. But there is no way to open schools without increasing the risk, and that risk will land unevenly on people I care about.
There's no easy solution here. All reasonable people know that our new reality requires risks we'd rather not take. But it's entirely fair for parents to expect their government to present a plan that does its absolute best to minimize those risks. A mask-mandate, retrofits to schools, holding classes outside or otherwise radically altering how we operate schools (Andrew Potter had some suggestions on that recently, also at The Line), cohorting of students in the smallest practical units, rapid testing and tracing of outbreaks, clearly communicated quarantine protocols for when clusters are found — these are all things that lower the risk that sending my children back to school poses to my parents and in-laws and aunt and grandmother. An aggressive, clear plan gives every parent in this province (and country) a firm footing from which they can make their own informed, evidence-based decisions.
That’s not what we have in Ontario. The plan is constantly changing. Communication is muddled. Obvious steps that could have been taken were (at least at first) conspicuously absent from the provincial plan. I didn’t expect perfection, but I absolutely expected better than what we got.
Every reasonable option the government leaves on the table, every dollar it chooses not to spend, every extra student they cram into a classroom cohort, is an efficiency paid for by shifting the cost onto families, a cost that will be paid in stress, heartbreak and, in some cases, illness and death. Maybe that’s a cost we’ll have to pay to keep the lights on and the crops planted — there are limits to what a government can do, or what taxpayers will collectively finance. Fine. But stop dismissing the concerns of parents as bogus just because the little ones aren’t likely to end up dead. My kids come first, sure, but my family is bigger than just the two of them.
Like I said, I don't expect perfection. But before I have to decide whether my parents get to see their grandkids for the next 10 months, it'd be nice to think that the government had at least made schools as safe as possible. Is there anyone right now who thinks they have?
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