Summer camp during coronavirus will look a little different
ELLICOTT CITY, Md. – Donning a white mask, YMCA counselor Aryan Shal tried to channel calm as he told the kids to imagine pushing a wave. Standing six feet apart, the group giggled as they imitated his movements.
The two dozen boys and girls were coronavirus pros. They knew to sit at opposite ends of tables, knew shared toys had to be disinfected first, and knew they shouldn’t suffer through a tummy ache but instead tell an adult right away.
“The kids are like, ‘Yeah, this feels a little weird, but we’re still having fun.’ It’s an adjustment obviously,” Shal, 22, said.
As the school year comes to an end amid an easing of stay-at-home orders, millions of U.S. parents face the nerve-racking decision whether to send their children to day care and summer camp. And they must do so without any clear data or large studies to guide them about the risks.
The Y, to its own surprise, has had few positive cases and no known outbreaks among its 1,000 locations and 40,000 children in care over the past three months.
Still, some states report worrisome numbers: 14 clusters in Maryland have been linked to child-care centers. But health officials in a half-dozen other states said they have seen no clusters in the centers. That forces parents to make choices on their own.
Economists say their collective decisions will help determine the trajectory of the financial recovery, with child care critical to returning sidelined workers to their jobs.
While some camps have gone out of business or opted to remain closed for the season, the YMCA, a community nonprofit, is welcoming hundreds of thousands of children in the next three months. Its experiences with child care in the first wave of the pandemic serve as a model for what families might expect.
Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California at Irvine, said that expecting the unexpected, including abrupt shutdowns, is going to be a big part of camp this year.
“The preamble should be that things can change at any time, and parents should be flexible,” he said.
When officials at the YMCA – the nation’s largest provider of youth services, typically serving 8 million children a year – began in March setting up emergency daycare centers nationwide for essential workers during the pandemic, they were prepared for things to go wrong. Pages of new protocols were put in place for infection control, social distancing, contact tracing and transparency with parents.
But as the months passed, they were baffled by what did not happen.
There were inevitably individual cases of positive coronavirus tests and numerous false alarms leading to temporary shutdowns, but no outbreaks in their facilities.
Heidi Brasher, a senior director at the Y’s headquarters in Chicago who is coordinating child-care operations across its affiliates, said she’s unsure whether that was because of the organization’s aggressive safety measures, or a confirmation that children don’t get or spread the virus as readily as adults – or some of both.
“The great thing is we had procedures in place to communicate with parents and to trace everyone’s movements,” Brasher said.
Health officials in states surveyed by The Washington Post this week offered a more mixed picture.
Arkansas, Massachusetts, Missouri and Pennsylvania said they were not aware of outbreaks in child-care centers over the past three months. In New Jersey, a covid-19 hot spot in March and April, there was a single report of a staff member and child being infected in Burlington County at the same facility.
In Arkansas, where child-care centers never closed, state epidemiologist Jennifer A. Dillaha said there had been 16 cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in children and 29 in staff members. But contact tracing showed the infections originated from household contacts or elsewhere rather than at day-care centers.
“We’ve been pleased we have not seen many cases in this setting,” she said.
In contrast, Maryland reported outbreaks – defined as two or more cases in a setting – in 11 child-care centers and three family child-care settings among 4,776 facilities open. It was unclear whether that was because of greater testing capability, more aggressive transmission of the virus in the general population, something specific to the operations of those providers or another cause.
Texas logged 242 positive cases (167 staff, 75 children) among the 12,172 child-care facilities that are open. But it was unclear how many, if any, were clusters that may have involved transmission at the sites because officials could not provide more details. As Dallas County on Thursday reported an all-time high in cases overall, officials noted that 17 children and staff in nine childcare facilities had been found positive during the past week.
Likewise, California officials said the state had 202 covid-19 cases related to child-care facilities, with 33,411 open, but declined to provide details “to protect privacy.” Jason Montiel, from the state’s public affairs office, said, “Thankfully, child care has not experienced any covid-19 deaths.”
The largest study on child care and covid-19 is expected to be out in July. Walter Gilliam, director of child development and social policy at Yale University’s School of Medicine, said he hopes the data, based on information from 100,000 providers nationwide, will help explain how children spread the virus and what prevention measures might be most effective amid intensifying calls to reopen child-care programs.
“We are asking people to go back to work to a job where they sometimes can’t socially distance. That’s asking a lot without any real sense of risk,” Gilliam said.
Australia, Denmark, Norway, Singapore and several other countries where schools and day-care centers reopened as early as April have reported no outbreaks and no resulting surge in cases in the larger population. In contrast, Israel abruptly shut its schools two weeks after reopening when a cluster of 130 cases emerged at a Jerusalem high school.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines, updated June 19, for the operation of day cares and camps, emphasizing that “the more people a camper or staff member interacts with, and the longer that interaction, the higher the risk of COVID-19 spread.”
The science on children and coronavirus has evolved dramatically since the first days of the pandemic, but many unanswered questions remain.
Most children appear to shrug off the virus with only mild symptoms or none at all. A study in the journal Nature Medicine published this week estimated that children may be only half as likely as adults to become infected. But since late April, a small but significant number of healthy children have developed a potentially deadly inflammatory complication linked to covid-19 that resembles Kawasaki disease. Doctors have had no way of determining who might be vulnerable – changing for many parents the calculation of returning to group care.
The larger, population-wide consequences of having so many children so close together in one place has been a source of much scientific – and political – controversy underlying the debate about whether to reopen schools in the fall.
Former CDC director Tom Frieden said that so far, the evidence suggests that “for kids, this pandemic is kind of like a flu season,” in which some experience severe illness but most are fine. That supports the reopening of some camps, he said, especially if they are held outdoors where there is a decreased risk of transmission. But before classrooms are reopened, Frieden said meticulous epidemiological studies must be conducted.
“One of the most important unknowns about the virus is do kids spread the infection prominently,” Frieden said. “There has not been any definitive data or even strong data about this.”
It was sometime in early May when Tom McHale’s children, ages 4 and 7, began to rebel against the idea of “stay at home.” They had started to zone out during Zoom classes, and his older one was begging to see friends.
With he and his wife working full time in jobs outside the home – he’s a construction manager, she’s a hospital technician – the Elkridge, Md., family was in a bind. They made it work, somehow, for two months but weren’t sure how much longer they could last.
The McHales were nervous about sending the children to day care, but after researching options and asking a lot of questions, they settled on the Y in central Maryland, which is operating 13 child-care locations in Baltimore and surrounding counties.
They liked that they could transition to summer camp, its proximity to his wife’s workplace and its history. In 1885, the YMCA pioneered the country’s first-known summer camp in Orange, N.Y., as an escape from what some called the “moral and physical degradations” of urban life.