There will be cases in schools and then tragedy, warns professor
WHEN school resumes ‘the risk level in our house goes up by a few orders of magnitude’, a UCC professor has said as he prepares to send his children back to education.
Professor Gerard Killeen, infectious disease ecologist at UCC, has been advising about how to deal with the pandemic for months, but from this week the problem will be much closer to home as his two children, aged 12 and 13, will be returning to secondary school tomorrow and Monday.
He told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘I am supposed to be an expert but on this one I just don’t have answers, because it is not possible to open schools safely. Schools are going back, kids want to be in the system whatever way it goes… In our house, we are going to go with the flow.’
He added that the schools are doing their best but they’ve been given ‘mission impossible’.
‘Unfortunately, what is going to happen is that they are going to reopen all the schools, sooner or later there is going to be a tragedy. Then we will close them again,’ he said.
‘But in the meantime, that creates a lot of risk for a lot of kids who are less likely to have serious problems but it is a long way short of zero. You are going to have some teachers, unfortunately, I think that is where the first casualties are going to be, I think it is going to be teachers.’
He also said that some parents could be at risk. He said that at some stage, he and his wife are going to have to sit down with their children and have a talk about risk management, the potential impact the virus could have on their wider family and ‘just how serious the consequences can be’.
‘For me that is not a conversation I ever wanted to be having with my 12year-old and my 13-year-old,’ he said, adding that once they return to school ‘suddenly, the risk level in our house goes up by a few orders of magnitude’.
‘We’ve got my dad down here now to have some time with them before the school reopens because once they do reopen, the risks of having them come and stay with us are just too high,’ he said.
Prof. Killeen added that ‘all we can do is pray’ that if it happens in their school ‘that it doesn’t leak into our family’.
He said this situation takes him back ten years when he, his wife and young family lived in rural Tanzania, where there was ongoing endemic malaria transmission and they were ten hours from the nearest decent hospital.
He said that malaria was treatable and they could plan in case one of them got infected with it, which unfortunately ended up happening to the couple’s daughter. ‘We were able to manage that, she did get malaria, we did look after her. She was fine, she recovered fully. Whereas if you get Covid there is not much you can do.
‘At that point it is out of your hands, largely. The feeling is very similar, but it is a lot more out of our control. I was prepared for the kids getting malaria and it did happen and we dealt with it. We are not delicate souls but we’re not prepared for this, either of us.
‘There are no drugs that we can put in the fridge, there is no preparation that we can do. We really dealt with malaria very aggressively and very effectively when we lived in rural Tanzania but there is nothing we can do about this.
‘There are no drugs, there is no pointof-care test that I can find in a pharmacy. People keep asking me “what do we do”. I don’t know,’ he said.
‘I think for our age category, my wife and I, in terms of us dying, risks are low but the chance of being left permanently disabled that is a bigger risk. That is a much longer way short of zero.’
Prof. Killeen said that the schools are doing their best but what they’ve been asked to do is ‘technically not feasible’.
‘You can mitigate, you reduce it, you can slow it down, you can minimise the impact but there will be outbreaks and there will be consequences,’ he said.
‘We are not prepared for this’