Blanket school closings no longer make medical sense
The feeling of school closures is all too familiar, now that we have been here twice before. It made sense the first time, as the pandemic was novel and we feared for our children’s health. We later learned that it is extremely rare for children to become seriously ill from COVID-19.
Our children returned to in-person learning in the fall. Things were looking up, until they weren’t. First came societal closures, followed by school closures.
With the second wave of school closures, the unintended harms became increasingly apparent. We saw working families struggle with child care, children struggle to engage online and the mental health of our most vulnerable suffer.
We have since learned that cases in schools are merely a reflection of community spread. We have acknowledged the negative impacts of school closures, yet there seems to be a glaring disconnect between what we know and our knee-jerk response to close all schools.
As a society, we have prioritized industry over schools and adults over children. We have accepted that many industries will never close and we have been able to deal with isolated outbreaks locally, for brief periods. Why isn’t this the case for schools?
We continue to see schools and communities disproportionately affected by this pandemic. And yet, somehow it continues to be easier to shut down schools provincewide than target the hardest hit postal codes. The Children’s Health Coalition Statement urged for paid sick days for essential workers, a vaccine strategy prioritizing hot spots and robust testing and tracing in hard hit areas. I am not the first to suggest a targeted approach to pandemic management and school closures. Since the reinitiation of in-person learning in September, we have implemented rolling classroom and school closures to address local outbreaks. Why doesn’t this approach suffice?
We are closing classrooms and placing students in emergency child-care facilities where they risk new exposures. We continue to keep daycares open, but label schools as unsafe. We leave families with no choice but for their elders to look after their children. Nurses, doctors and other allied health workers are forced to stay home, contributing to workplace shortages. I think it is fair to say that there is a better way.
As long as we leave the door open for all schools to close, we will continue to find ourselves in this very situation. Sweeping school closures do not have to occur. We can continue to address school outbreaks on a school-by-school basis, while simultaneously ramping up targeted interventions in hard hit areas. It is time to trust what science is telling us, to acknowledge the negative impacts of closures on our children and families and to implement a strategy that holds promise. When it is clear that the harms of province-wide school closures outweigh the benefits, it is time to switch gears.
Dr. Alanna Golden is a former social worker in children’s mental health. She is a practising primary care physician in Toronto and a mother of three young children.