Very soon all teachers will have been vaccinated or at least have the opportunity to have been.
Does this mean our children will be allowed to stop using masks?
Until now children under the age of 6 have not had to wear masks.
Basically because wearing a mask for a young child actually increases their chances of exposure to the virus because they are so unlikely to wear it correctly and they won’t stop touching their faces (mine are just as likely to lick the supermarket floor).
This is aligned with UNICEF and WHO recommendations.
But what is concerning is the blanket rule in South Africa for older children, forcing them to wear masks in public and at school.
WHO guidelines are that the masking of children between 6 and 11 years old should be risk-based, taking into consideration a number of factors, including the “impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development, in consultation with teachers, parents/caregivers and/or medical providers”.
In my discussions with other parents I have noted with concern the enormous fear many of our children are living in.
My 7-year-old niece imagined the coronavirus was akin to a monster that came out at night and ate people. It was how she made sense of the curfew.
The concept of a virus is quite difficult for young kids to understand and it is easy to see how the danger they are in could get magnified exponentially.
According to PANDA (Pandemics Data & Analytics) for people under 70, the median infection fatality rate (IFR) for Covid-19 is 0.05 percent.
This estimate includes individuals with comorbidities, which implies that it is significantly lower for those without.
For children and young people the IFR is “near zero”.
They are also not the main drivers of transmissions to adults.
Teaching is therefore one of the safest professions to be in right now.
But bizarrely society behaves as if children are at huge risk and are ‘super spreaders’.
At the start of the pandemic we did not have much information to base anything on, so closing schools seemed wise, but more than a year later this is no longer the case.
There are many scientists and researchers who are saying that closing schools during the last year has done nothing for the fight against Covid-19 and has only been detrimental to learning, specifically for the poor.
What will they be saying about the masking of children in a year’s time?
The act of masking adults itself is not backed by conclusive scientific evidence, and even less so in children.
This was supported by the WHO in December 2020, which stated that “At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.”
I might be stirring the hornets’ nest here, but we have to ask ourselves the hard questions.
Are we forcing children to mask up because of irrational fear?
And are we making children unnecessarily fearful when they are not at risk, nor are they a danger to others?
