Mike Buckley reports on how the Government has wasted a year in providing COVID-19 protection for nearly nine million pupils
If the measure of a healthy society is that it takes care of its vulnerable, then the UK is failing. This can clearly be seen with the Coronavirus crisis.
The Government has failed to protect vulnerable groups from the health impacts of COVID-19. Deaths among care home residents were needlessly and tragically high in the first wave. Six in 10 people who died in England in 2020 were disabled, even though one in 10 people in the population have a disability. The risk of death has also been disproportionately high among black and ethnic minority groups, who are more likely to work in low-paid jobs where they are unable to isolate or self distance.
But, despite these tragedies, the Government have not learned caution.
The rushed opening of schools last week without adequate safety measures risks adding a further group of vulnerable people to the list of those harmed: children.
While the devolved Welsh and Scottish Governments are acting a little more cautiously, the UK Government has opened all English schools on a single day without the protections put in place in other countries and advised by the World Health Organisation and its own advisors on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
Long-Term Risks
The mass re-opening of schools puts 8.9 million pupils into indoors environments in which they cannot socially distance, where there is inadequate ventilation, and where many of them are not forced to wear masks. It is little different to asking the same number of office workers to return to their desks, much as the Government would wish us to believe otherwise.
The potential for transmission of the virus is huge. In the early days of the pandemic, it was hoped that children would be unlikely to catch COVID-19. Because the virus is more lethal among older groups it was believed that children were either immune or at least far less likely to catch it. However, we now know that children are about as likely to become infected as older people, in part due to the new variant.
Once children have the virus, they pass it on just as adults do. Recent analyses from the Office for National Statistics suggest that, once schools are open, two to 12-year-olds are twice as likely, and 12-16-year-olds are seven times more likely, to be the index case in a household compared with adults. Both age groups are twice as likely to transmit to contacts within the household compared to adults.
Given that most adults are yet to be vaccinated, and those that have in most cases have had only one dose, the adult population is not yet immune. While children are still highly unlikely to die from the Coronavirus, they are increasingly likely to develop symptoms. Among those who do become infected, five to 10% develop ongoing symptoms, otherwise known as Long COVID.
Children with long-term symptoms seem to stay sick. Parents describe a range of symptoms affecting children’s physical and mental health, including fatigue, personality changes, depression and skin complaints. It seems not to make any difference whether the child had pre-existing health conditions or whether the initial infection was symptomatic or not.
Many scientists believe that a zero COVID-19 approach, as followed in much of Asia and New Zealand, is the only safe course of action. In the short-term, it saves lives and prevents long-term sickness, as well as allowing largely normal daily life, albeit with the caveat that borders are closed and tracing systems need to be robust.
Just as importantly in the long-term, pursuing zero infections protects a country’s population, including its children, from as yet unknown long-term effects of COVID-19 which scientists are only beginning to guess at.
Viruses, including other coronaviruses,