BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
The risk of coronavirus to children is a fraction of what it is for the flu every single year. No one ever talks about closing schools for that.
But now officials plan to close schools throughout the Peninsula because of the coronavirus.
People might say that children don’t get seriously ill from this virus, but they might pass it on.
“We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents,” said Kari Stefansson, April 27, Interview with Science Museum Group.
They’re big on contact tracing, but they did it with a boy who got COVID-19. “172 contacts were monitored … The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions within schools suggests potential different transmission dynamics in children.”
Switzerland’s head of infectious diseases, Daniel Koch, says “(Scientists) now know young children don’t transmit the virus,” according to Health National Center for Biotechnology Information and Sky News. Other schools, starting with Denmark, have already reopened schools … critics say that we have thousands of new cases every day and Denmark doesn’t. But they reopened schools month ago, according to Reuters.
“This is not safe, it’s harming our children,” Koch says.
Closing our schools will hurt the “emotional well being” of students, something we used to hear so often in Palo Alto as certain activists used that argument to dumb-down curriculum.
“The results are in for remote learning: it didn’t work,” wrote the Wall Street Journal on June 5.
Worse is the impact on our economy. If kids can’t go to school, many parents have to stay home with them. In Palo Alto, this may not be a concern among parents who are the most involved in school policy as they have jobs that allow them to spend a great deal of time on non-work pursuits. But in poorer families, where people struggle to put food on the table, this is a real concern. The fact that the impact of school closure on working class families isn’t a consideration tells you a lot about income inequality in Palo Alto, and how the activists don’t give a damn about the poor.
Other countries are way ahead of the U.S. when it comes to classroom learning and COVID-19.
Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, said on May 2, “… I have examined all of the available evidence from within Australia and around the world and, as it stands, it does not support avoiding classroom learning as a means to control COVID-19.”
In Canada, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto on June 17 warned about masks. “… If worn incorrectly, it could lead to increased risk of infection and it is not practical for a child to wear a mask properly for the duration of a school day.” As for physical distancing, the hospital says, “…strict physical distancing should not be emphasized to children in the school setting as it is not practical and could cause significant psychological harm.”
The U.S. appears to be alone in closing its schools because of the coronavirus. We shouldn’t be closing our schools without more data.