Are we overreacting to COVID by keeping our son home for school? Spoiler alert, we're not.
I'm not going to lie. I was a bit nervous when we decided to pull our son out of the district this summer and home-school instead.
By all accounts, COVID-19 was getting under control. Vaccines were spreading. People in our area seemed to be masking.
But he isn't old enough for the vaccine, and we could see a world where schools would start relaxing safety protocols.
My wife and I were worried that our school district would see things getting better and let up too soon. I was worried that we might be pulling him out of the classroom setting he needs because of our own fears, that we were hurting his education for the sake of our misguided worries.
Good lord was I wrong.
Classrooms are ground zero for COVID-19 politics
The new school year is in full swing across the country, and the classroom is the new political battleground for the pandemic.
Governors are banning mask mandates, forget trying to get people vaccinated. Parents – actual parents – are protesting the possibility of their children being made to wear a mask.
It's gotten so combative that districts in several states are in open rebellion against their governors. Think about that for a moment. Districts wanting to require masks of everybody is now an act of civil disobedience. Protecting kids is politically bad.
And the same governors are actively pushing back. They’re making all sorts of threats against schools that are mandating masks. They’re stomping their feet over the most basic form of protection against an unrelenting virus. I can’t even wrap my brain around that.
Now, there are going to be voices in the crowd saying that COVID-19 and the delta variant aren’t especially deadly to children. A report by the American Academy of Pediatrics says more than 4.5 million children have tested positive for COVID-19, as of last week. More than 180,000 new cases were added in the past week.
To put that in perspective, there have been almost 38 million cases overall in the United States. So, 4.5 million is a relatively small number.
The percentage of the COVID-19 pie gets smaller for children when you look at deaths. Of the 44 states included in the report, up to 0.03% of child cases resulted in death, according to that pediatrics report.
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These are facts that should bring a level of comfort to parents and families who live in states where governors are in open warfare against common sense.
Thankfully, our local district doesn't have these issues. It mandates masks indoors and has strengthened the rules around vaccines. But our son is a long way from being vaccinated, and allowing masks outside isn't great. I just don't trust people to do the right thing for the long haul.
Pretend people are getting sick from bad chicken
Think of it this way: Peloton recalled treadmills in May after one child died and there were more than 70 reports of injuries. Tysons Foods recalled nearly 9 million pounds of product after a handful of people got sick and one died. Did you know that there was a nationwide shrimp recall after only nine people got sick since November? Where are the protests over our rights to eat whatever we want regardless of the dangers it poses?
Welcome to COVID-19. Yes, a small percentage of kids have died. But how silly is it to say it’s acceptable because wearing masks or keeping kids away from each other somehow stunts their learning? Oh, and we don’t even know the long-term impact COVID-19 has on people. But early reports point to a pandemic that will have a brutal aftermath.
COVID unites us?: To COVID-19, there are no red states, no blue states, just the United States
I agree that many, maybe most, children learn better in a dynamic classroom where social skills can be built. I do believe that it’s easier to teach kids in person and that at the height of remote learning, there were kids who missed meals and disabled children who were ignored. My autistic son saw less and less attention as the school year progressed, and he missed out on therapies that help him learn.
These are all reasons why I spent much of my summer second-guessing our decision to do home-school as things seemed to be improving. The number of daily cases nationally plummeted from April to July. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in May that people who were fully vaccinated could take off their masks in certain situations. Putting aside that the CDC has been problematic this whole time and was super naive to think that people would understand the nuance of that new guideline, it was a sign that things were getting better.
What if I was wrong?
So I thought maybe, just maybe, the school year would find some sense of normal if we could all just keep getting vaccinated and wearing masks when it made sense.
But not anymore. We’re knee-deep in a wave of the delta variant that is running roughshod over states, and districts are being made to ignore the very safety measures that were starting to bring the pandemic under control.
So we’ll keep our son away until he’s vaccinated and we’ll deal with the stress that will come from home-schooling and the worry that he’s missing out. We’ll do our best to foster exploration through field trips and bring in varied learning tools to help him stay on task. We’ll keep wearing masks when we go out and insist people who visit do the same.
What we won’t do is send him to a pandemic that is gaining strength again while people are playing politics with his well-being and making the argument that any number of children dying or getting sick is acceptable because masks are a burden and vaccines are bad.
Louie Villalobos (@louievillalobos) is the audience development editor for Paste BN's Editorial Board.