I'm a pediatrician. I'm also a parent of a young child who is about to go to school for the first time.
Throughout the entire pandemic, the children's hospital I work at has admitted a total of eight kids for acute COVID infection. Eight in seventeen months. No deaths, no subsequent long COVID as far as I'm aware. We've actually had more adults than kids admitted with COVID, because during the worst of the third wave when the adult ICUs were full to bursting we accepted adult patients for the first time in the history of our institution. Even though Delta is the dominant variant in our community now, our last pediatric COVID admission was in the springtime.
Nevertheless our hospital has been at or over capacity for at least the last year. Not with COVID and not with the other infectious diseases that usually fill us up (because the kids aren't catching colds and gastro from each other like they usually do), but with the knock-on effects of anguish and alienation.
Self-injury, assaults, motor vehicle collisions with an intoxicated teenage driver, overdoses both accidental and intentional, one after the other, way beyond anything we've previously seen. Many of these children have not survived to discharge. Many survivors are left with permanent deficits. Our eating disorders program is 'operating' at 300% capacity and our inpatient psychiatry unit is broken. Our child abuse specialists are overwhelmed. I spent a month working in our PICU the month after schools closed again during the third wave, and I had five or six awful stories. And this is leaving aside many hospitalizations for less dire indications like malnutrition, somatization syndromes, and treatment plan nonadherence (the average blood sugars of kids with diabetes have gone through the roof).
As with natural disasters and climate change, I can't definitively pin any particular one of these cases on school closures and the social deprivation these kids are facing, but at the end of the day you look at the overall pattern and there is no way around it. A lot of hands have been wrung throughout the pandemic about kids' mental health; nobody seems to talk about the fact that it is literally killing them. Another lost school year will kill more of them.
All is not lost. Student-to-student transmission is pretty rare, especially among pre-pubertal (ie vaccine-ineligible) kids. If the adults around them are vaccinated and wearing masks, if the classroom is well-ventilated, if the community rates are kept low by mask/vaccine/capacity limit policies, then the kids will be okay. Even with Delta, even before we can mass-immunize them. We can get them through these few months. But school shutdowns have to be the absolute last resort and any authority that wants to shut them down without doing everything in their power to achieve basic safety practices has blood on their hands. I don't want to watch another healthy 16-year-old die of loneliness.
rairfoundation.com
Zdaj veste kdaj bo konec. 
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