Poor policy decisions are putting parents and children in an untenable situation. Many schools are not safe. Schools and universities have been open for nearly a month in the US and there has been record child illness, hospitalization and death.
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Infected children are bringing covid home. In one neighborhood in Chicago two mothers died last week after contracting covid just a couple of weeks after school opened. Making children instruments of their parents deaths is a cruelty that is against every tenet of human rights
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Harm to children in hospitalizations, long covid, deaths repeat around the world. Not only are schools not being made safe, despite available ways to do so, parents are being coerced to send their children to unsafe schools by punitive laws, or lack of safer alternatives.
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It is unacceptable that policymakers in some countries, who are not doing their responsibility to protect, are instead threatening families with coercion if their children don’t attend school.
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Without collective action there will be no change. Good policy, based upon compassion, would dictate that society provide safety for children, parents, teachers and communities.
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The long term consequences of covid are not fully known, but multiple studies suggest that over 1 in 10 children get long covid symptoms and that cases without symptoms still have neurological impacts.
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Meanwhile CDC guidelines on quarantine, testing and safer schools are vastly inadequate for the Delta variant and have led to inconsistent and unsafe policies at the local level across the nation.
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As throughout the pandemic, this has disproportionately affected poor, black, latinx, indigenous, immigrant and working people.
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Declaring "we'll all eventually get it" is not a public health strategy. Safer measures are possible, with masks, consistent testing, ventilation, filtration, vaccination, contact tracing, quarantines, and virtual learning options.
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If policymakers won’t protect us, we have to come together to protect each other.
Prevention is possible and should not be politicized.
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Prevention is possible and should not be politicized.
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Individual actions are not enough. We need to act together. We encourage everyone to consider how they can help each other during this time in which policymakers have turned against their own people. Policymakers are promoting pandemic harm rather than opposing it.
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The only way to answer this is to support each other.
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