Sick children must stay home
As New Zealand, almost alone in the world, steps tentatively towards a – sort of – Covid-19-free future we parents face a quandary: when is it safe for our kids to go back to school?
The answer is elusive. Just a couple of days ago we had the Ministry of Health explaining, confidently, that kids will be safe at school. They don’t seem to get infected as often as adults, they don’t suffer those traumatic complications when they do get infected, and apparently they do not spread the virus to adults easily, either.
Then we receive worrying reports of a possible emerging late-infection inflammatory syndrome severely affecting children from the UK, Spain and Italy.
The ministry’s assertions from a couple of days ago are supported by the literature, but that literature is scant. Realistically, we don’t have a solid understanding of the paediatric issues associated with Covid-19 because we don’t have a solid understanding of this novel virus. It remains, in many senses, an unknown.
The reports from the UK, Spain and Italy demonstrate how quickly knowledge is changing.
As we move down alert levels we need to be incredibly cautious about the risks we are taking as a society and we need to think about how to deal with kids who are sick in a different way.
Many of you would have read about the unnecessary fast-food lines on Tuesday with concern. For me it was a sort of a sad, dull acceptance that there are so many citizens in our country who do not get what carnage might follow from not taking this virus seriously.
To date, I have been really impressed by the Government’s response, led by the Ministry of Health. But my faith in that has been somewhat shaken by the advice it gave to the Ministry of Education regarding the risk to kids, particularly to kids like my son who have underlying health conditions. We still do not know enough about this novel virus. I have contacted both ministries about this.
My question to parents is: will you send your kids back to school with this level of unknown?
The answer for us as a family is relatively simple. We do not need to send our kids back under level three, or any level in fact, because we can easily work from home. And that, I know, is a huge privilege.
In its advice to the Ministry of Education regarding opening schools, the Ministry of Health set out a good range of conditions, including a strict nosickness policy – but officials include this note: ‘‘Stricter sickness policies will also push up absenteeism for essentialworker parents due to needing to stay home when children are ill with non Covid-19 winter respiratory viruses.’’
The word absenteeism implies a habit of being off work without a good reason. This is not the message we can be sending any more regarding caring for sick kids, Covid-19 or otherwise.
We need to think of ways as a society to incentivise and support parents to keep their kids home if they are sick, not punish them, which is, in effect, what happened before Covid-19.
If we have a Covid-19 outbreak, which is possible, then kids will catch it too, and some of them may develop severe complications.
The Government needs to step up now and work out how to support parents to keep their sick kids at home. They do not belong at school.
Dr Andrew Dickson is a health sociologist at Massey University