Level with parents on realities of COVID, school
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a narrative gathered steam in which safely weathering the forthcoming ordeal would bolster the average citizen’s faith in science, in public health, in expertise in general.
Populist leaders from Boris Johnson to Doug Ford and even, to a very inconsistent extent, Donald Trump, were abandoning their I-knowbest bravado and publicly putting their faith in epidemiologists, immunologists, mathematicians and public health boffins. We would all be grateful for their wisdom, sagacity and guidance.
We were so young. It has been darkly fascinating to watch much of elite public opinion sour on certain senior public health officials in particular, especially as parents ponder sending their kids back to school.
On social media, David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, has become Dr. Punching Bag — and not for no reason. He long ago proved himself an utterly hopeless communicator, which is an untenable quality for a man in his position.
“If there was a risk, I would not recommend the schools be opened,” he remarked two weeks ago, without mentioning what risk he was talking about. Clearly there’s a risk of something!
It’s no surprise, then, that Williams’ sign-off on Ontario’s back-to-school plan isn’t worth a dime among the most dissatisfied parents — who in general seem to be of a progressive bent, precisely the sort of people who had been preaching trust in experts back in March.
Even Bonnie Henry, Williams’ much-lionized counterpart in Victoria, is getting an earful from some parents now that cases have spiked and she is resisting calls to make masks mandatory in schools.
Recently published backto-school plans in British
Columbia, Alberta and Ontario are long on details about how things will function technically.
But parents have been left at the media’s mercy to answer some very basic questions and resolve some obvious contradictions: If I’m only supposed to bubble with 10 people, how does a class of 20 kids make sense? Can my kids still hang out with their grandparents if they go back to school? (If you’re worried enough to ask, probably not.)
In this information vacuum, the media’s weakness for hyperbole and bad news — especially American bad news — only makes it worse. Most importantly: Anyone who compares the back-toschool situation in any Canadian jurisdiction to what’s going on in the United States, as the president of the Elementary Teachers of Toronto did in a recent Toronto Star op-ed, is either woefully ignorant or trying to scare you.
Canada’s leading COVID-19 hot spot right now appears to be Brandon, Man. There, the Prairie Mountain
Health authority is reporting 206 active cases, or 1,200 per million population. Southern Manitoba and the Edmonton region are at around 450 cases per million. The British Columbia health unit containing Vancouver stands at 325, Calgary at 217, Ottawa at 168, Toronto at 78.
Headlines like “Florida confirmed 9K new COVID-19 cases among children within 15 days as schools reopen” come from jurisdictions like Miami-dade County, which is currently reporting an astonishing 55,000 active cases per million. In a city roughly the size of Toronto, one in 18 people has a confirmed case of COVID-19! In Toronto, it’s one in 13,000. In many sizable communities across Canada, it’s zero. It’s like comparing apples to aircraft carriers.
With the notable exception of Israel, which committed some bizarrely basic errors, there remains no evidence of school reopenings in communities with reasonably low COVID-19 caseloads jurisdictions even being associated with significant spikes in new cases, let alone causing them.
There will be COVID-19 cases in schools, though. Nobody denies that; some officials, including Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Vinita Dubey, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health, have conceded it in so many words. But no one seems yet to have defined what success and failure looks like: In what circumstances should parents be worried things are going off the rails?
Unless governments start managing expectations much more specifically, then the first inevitable cases will get the “Saddam Invades Kuwait” headline treatment in much of the Canadian media, and that won’t be good for anyone.
A good example: Last week CBC ran a breathless Associated Press item reporting that “at least 41 schools in Berlin have reported students or teachers are infected with the coronavirus — not even two weeks after they reopened in the German capital.” It was based on a report in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, which read rather differently. It noted that just 4.5 per cent of schools in the German capital had reported any cases, that in most schools just one student or teacher was infected, that it posed no risk to the overall back-to-school plan, and that there was no evidence at all that the school environment was to blame.
The virus didn’t spontaneously generate in the schools’ bathrooms. Someone brought it in from outside, it was caught, and it was dealt with. If you can’t stomach that, then you shouldn’t send your kids to school under any circumstances — no matter how masked-up and socially distanced they are.
You shouldn’t have to take that from me, and I’m certainly not demanding that you do. And it’s understandable the experts are reluctant to put things so bluntly — especially where back-to-school is mandatory, and the plans are far from unimpeachable. But unless they level with parents, all their hard work may end up being for naught as soon as the inevitable occurs.