Keeping children safe is a goal shared by all, but the moment of assured, absolute safety is not in sight, and it won’t be by September, either
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s decision to keep the province’s schools closed until September was certainly no surprise, despite a series of previous announcements holding out hope that the current school year would resume before summer.
Keeping children safe is surely a goal shared by all, but the moment of assured, absolute safety is not in sight, and it won’t be by September, either. What’s required is a rational examination of the risk of reopening the province’s schools. An Australian study, done in a district that did not close down schools, shows that children are not the super-spreaders of the virus people had earlier assumed, and that those children who did get the disease had mild symptoms. That study is being examined by Canadian health officials.
And yet, in Ontario, the government is not sharing any of this information from elsewhere and continues to say that opening the schools will be conditional on the number of positive cases identified by its inadequate and unfocused testing regime. It’s the wrong way to assess the risk to children. As B.C. notes, “most cases in children have been linked to a symptomatic family member.
It won’t be easy. Parents are in a fragile state. Those working full-time from home while attempting to help their children learn online can’t keep that up forever. Parents who need to work outside the home are even worse off. And yet, they are worried about their children’s health.
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