Emma Teitel

Parents of unvaccinated kids wait for relief,

Congratulations Toronto! Thanks to the 77 per cent of us and counting who are fully vaccinated, the downtown core doesn’t have tumbleweeds blowing through its centre.

Instead, this September, it has blaring car horns, frosh students, frazzled commuters (and in the distance, for the first time in more than a year, the droning of a Porter airplane).

You know your city has been through a lot when you celebrate the return of things you once complained about.

In fact, urban traffic congestion is back with such a vengeance that on Tuesday, Toronto Mayor John Tory introduced an official “action plan” to manage it, one that includes: “pausing new nonessential utility cut work during the first two weeks of September,” and “actively monitoring traffic cameras around the city, especially at congestion hot spots to provide real-time problem solving.”

But pedestrian congestion is back too: the good kind. After recent gross displays of antivaccination protest in the city, it was nice to see young people who embrace science — a.k.a. U of T’s engineering students — roaming Yonge Street in their signature hard hats this week. School is no longer exclusively a massive Zoom tile. Neither is city hall.

“It’s been wonderful to welcome residents into these buildings,” Tory said at a news conference Wednesday alluding to the recent return of many city staff to city buildings, from those dealing with matters of tax and utilities to those issuing marriage licenses. The city, says Tory, is “laser focused” on reaching a 90 per cent full vaccination rate. “We are closer to the end of the pandemic than we are to the beginning,” he said.

But despite the positive developments cited above, this isn’t true for everyone — at least it doesn’t feel true. Yes, the city is inching back to life. Yes, people are slowly returning to office towers, lecture halls and subway cars.

However, none of this changes the fact that while one group of Torontonians is moving into a period of reduced anxiety about the virus, another group is stuck at square one — paralyzed with worry.

The term “split society” is used these days in reference to the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. But lately the term has me thinking about a different split: the split between those who have children under 12 and those who don’t.

And those of us who have children under 12 — a.k.a. unvaccinated children — do not feel like we are nearing the end of a dark chapter. We feel like we’re at the beginning of a brand new one.

Our kids are unvaccinated and therefore unprotected from COVID-19, yet they are walking into Ontario schools and daycares this week amid a Delta-fuelled fourth wave, oftentimes into classes whose numbers aren’t nearly small enough — where distancing looks virtually impossible and scientific modelling is grim. Severe COVID-19 illness is rare in children, but news of crowded pediatric wards in U.S. hospitals doesn’t exactly quell parent anxiety on that front. Neither do endlessly confusing statements from public health officials.

Consider this one from Toronto’s top doctor, Eileen de Villa, a person I deeply respect and whose job I don’t envy — but who can be infuriatingly vague at times. On Wednesday, de Villa said the following:

“The Delta variant has not spoiled everything though, and won’t, if we act to give it less room to manoeuvre. That happens through vaccination and through picking and choosing what we do and when and how and where we do it.

The simplest yardstick for reducing contact is this: ask yourself is this something you need to do or something you want to do? What simple limits or adjustments can you make to your plans to reduce the number of people you interact with?”

Unfortunately, these rhetorical questions are meaningless to parents of unvaccinated children in daycare and school who have no control over the “limits and adjustments” of the environments their kids walk into everyday.

But de Villa’s questions are also meaningless because the state itself contradicts her at every turn. If a city’s malls and strip clubs are open, does it really make sense for its public health figures to ask people to prioritize needs over wants? If the “wants” are wide open, people will indulge them. It helps that at the end of the month, most people indulging their wants — a.k.a. enjoying non-essential activity — will have to produce a vaccine certificate. That’s certainly a relief.

But until the vaccine is approved for kids under 12, there will be no relief for parents of unvaccinated kids in school. There will be no relief for parents with unvaccinated toddlers in daycare. And there’s nothing we can do about that except worry and wait. Toronto may be shedding some of its COVID-19 anxiety. Torontonians caring for little kids are not.