The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
25% of parents distorted students’ COVID status
Study co-authored by Middlesex Community College professor
MIDDLETOWN — More than 25 percent of parents surveyed report they were less than truthful about their children’s COVID-19 status or that they didn’t follow the disease’s preventive guidelines during the pandemic for their offspring, according to a nationwide study.
It was in part led by scientists at the University of Utah Health and Middlesex Community College in Middletown, a press release said.
Among the most common reasons cited were an inability to stay home from work to care for their sick children, and wanting to make decisions about their child’s health care without input from outside authorities, the statement added.
In some cases, parents had a different motivation for lying, the news release indicated. Some parents of
younger children lied about their child’s age so they could get vaccinated.
The finding raises concerns that parental reluctance to disclose that their children had the disease or didn’t adhere to COVID-19 prevention protocols could
have contributed to the spread of the infection, and exacerbated its high rates of hospitalization and death, according to Angela Fagerlin, senior author of the study and chairwoman of the Department of Population Health Sciences at
University of Utah Health.
“The pandemic created tremendous stress for all of us, particularly parents,” according to Andrea Gurmankin Levy, co-first author of the study and Middlesex professor of social sciences. In addition to
Levy, Fagerlin and her colleagues conducted the study in conjunction with researchers in Colorado, Iowa and Great Britain, the college said.
“Like everyone else, parents worried about getting sick with COVID-19 or about losing their job, but parents also had to manage juggling job responsibilities while their children were home in quarantine,” Levy said in the prepared statement. “And it’s quite possible that some parents misrepresented their child’s COVID-19 status or didn’t adhere to testing or quarantine rules in an attempt to ease some of this burden.”
The study appears in the March 6 issue of JAMA Network Open, and follows up on earlier findings by the same research team that concluded four of 10 American adults misled others about whether they had COVID-19 or adhered to public health measures to help corral the disease.
A subset of 580 participants in the original study, who reported being parents or guardians of children younger than 18 living with them during the pandemic, were asked additional survey questions about COVID-19 choices they made on behalf of their offspring.
Overall, about 26 percent of parents misrepresented a child’s COVID-19 status in some way, the statement said. Of those:
• About 60 percent reported that they deceived others about their child’s vaccination status when they wanted their unvaccinated children to participate in an activity that required vaccination.
• Among parents who reported misleading others about their child having COVID or not following public health recommendations, more than 50 percent reported doing so because they wanted the freedom to do what they thought best for their family.
• Nearly 43 percent of parents said they didn’t tell others that their children had COVID because they didn’t want them to miss school.
• About 35 percent of parents didn’t disclose that their child had COVID, because, in part, they could not afford to miss work to care for them.
The study may be accessed at jamanetwork.com.