CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER
It's been a month since schools reopened in British Columbia. Did you send your children back to the classroom? If you did, why? And if you didn't, why not?
Was your decision about your children's education based on anecdotal evidence or was it based on facts?
Did you dig into the numbers? Chana Davis has a PHD in genetics and a deep background in biomedical sciences and she is the mother of three elementary-aged children. Like all parents, she struggled with the question about sending her children back to school.
She turned to the Harvard Global Health Institute for guidance to help measure the risk.
The institute says less than 10 new cases a day per 100,000 people is a signal to be cautious, but it's not high-risk.
Then she looked at the local risk in her community.
“In Vancouver between Aug. 21 and Sept. 3, there were 307 cases, which when divided into 14 days equals 22 cases per day. Then divide the population of the city into that figure, to learn that means there were three new daily cases per 100,000 people. That puts Vancouver at the bottom end of the yellow or cautious zone.”
Davis calculated there is about a four per cent chance of her children being exposed to COVID-19. Davis, host of the video podcast Get Real Health and author of Fueled by Science, joined a Conversation That Matters about how she decided it was OK to send her children back to school. See the video at vancouversun.com/tag/conversations-that-matter. Conversations That Matter is a partner program for the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. The production of this program is made possible thanks to the support of viewers like you. Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge at goo.gl/ypxyds