'Children are the voiceless victims'
NELSON MANDELA said that ‘the true character of a society is revealed in how it treats its children’.
The CCA should have those wise words displayed at their press conferences, because since Covid arrived on our shores that dictum from a great man – renowned for his wisdom – seems to have been disregarded.
When the history books are written about these Covid times, I have no doubt that they will conclude that the best interests of children were not well served.
Future generations will be unlikely to look kindly on what happened, because children have had their lives and educations upended – essentially to protect older generations – and this has been part of what is an increasingly futile attempt to stop what is now an endemic virus from spreading in an adult population that is already protected as best as it can ever be by very high vaccination rates and/or by prior exposure to the virus.
This is happening when we know – and those making the decisions must also know – that Covid represents a vanishingly small risk to children, and that the interventions being foisted on children have already caused them so much harm.
A recent Daily Telegraph editorial summed it up so well: ‘The manner in which the interests of the young have been disregarded is all the more extraordinary given that the virus itself poses very little risk to their health. It is sometimes said that Covid does not discriminate. That has been completely wrong.’
Consider the following data and the comments from experts in child health:
Scientists from University College Hospital and the Universities of York, Bristol and Liverpool established ‘in the most comprehensive studies of children anywhere in the World that with just 25 deaths in a population of some 12 million children in England, it gives a broad, overall mortality rate from Covid of two per million children’ (i.e. 99.995% of children infected with Covid will not die of it).
Dr Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the study showed ‘very, very tiny numbers of children dying from Covid’. She went on to say that successive lockdowns and social distancing caused far greater consequences ‘through lost education, mental health, and other collateral damage with much of the damage yet to be seen’.
Russel Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and professor of Child and Adolescent Health at UCL, warned: ‘When you look at the data together, it tells us that the indirect effects of the pandemic on children are significantly greater than the direct effects’ and that it is ‘suffocating their mental health and is risking permanent scarring’ and ‘it does serious harm’ not only to children’s education but also to their mental and physical health.
And yet this data and an abundance of other data in exactly the same vein, together with high level warnings from leading experts in paediatrics about the deleterious impacts on children’s mental and physical health and their future prospects as a result of current policy, have clearly not been assimilated and acted on.
Children are indeed the voiceless victims in all of this.
Consider what is happening in Guernsey:
The CCA are requiring that masks are worn by children at school in many settings; they are continuing to insist on track and trace for children who may have mixed with another child at school who has tested positive, and those children are then subjected to a lateral flow test for 10 consecutive days – and for many children this is happening multiple times; a positive PCR test and a child is forced to self-isolate at home for 10 days with all the loneliness and loss of learning that this causes; all children are expected to have lateral flow nasal tests on a regular basis – even the youngest children – and it is known that this is causing genuine trauma for many, particularly younger children; a sneeze or a cough at school and the child must go home and miss even more lessons, socialising, and sport.
All of this fear and uncertainty is diluting children’s joie de vivre, it is impoverishing their critically important formative years and it is taking away their rites of passage, and as it does this it is putting yet more kindling under the already raging fires of child mental ill health on the island.
So it is definitely damaging children’s mental and physical health, whether that be from the enforced mask wearing in school that evidence shows stunts their ability to communicate properly because they cannot detect facial expressions; the fear induced from most people around them at school all masked up; the exaggerated messaging of imminent illness or death like a monotone of despair, with case numbers given out every day, but without any proper context provided; the sight of parents wearing masks at the school gate in fresh air; the warnings that circulate about being careful not to ‘kill granny’ or for children to ‘do their bit’ to protect parents and vulnerable people; and of course the misinformation from the start that children are at considerable risk from dying of the virus, when in reality there is virtually no risk of that happening at all.
All of this troubles young minds more than we can ever appreciate, and it diminishes children emotionally. It embeds in their young minds the idea that to communicate verbally and freely with their peers in the normal way established over millennia can be the ‘vector’ for death and illness – again when the evidence from research in many countries shows that children do not transmit the virus to any great extent at all to adults.
Furthermore, trying to stop children being exposed to infections may have serious future consequences. Professor Viner of UCL warned: ‘Wrapping children in cotton wool risks rebounding on us as the lack of exposure to everyday bugs could leave immune systems more vulnerable’.
To continue on a dead end road, which the data map shows beyond any reasonable doubt is dangerous to take children down, is not to be forgiven easily. I imagine that those making these decisions to press on in this direction in the face of the clear evidence that it is causing real harm to children, will face stern criticism in the years to come. What is still happening to children, almost two years into Covid, brings to mind the aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein, ‘that madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.
With Covid endemic now – so circulating for ever more on the planet and in Guernsey – the time has surely come after almost two years of dislocation to children’s lives and education, to lift these needless and damaging impediments that place such a burden on children who are not themselves at any statistical risk of death from the virus.
We must return to the children their inviolable rights and give them back their freedoms to be children; we must afford them the education that they deserve as of right by removing all the impediments and the interruptions to their education that have so blighted their lives (and their parents' lives) for almost two years.
TIM CHESNEY
Deputy Peter Ferbrache, chairman of the Civil Contingencies Authority, responds:
THE first thing I’d like to clarify is that we are still in a global pandemic.
It is not within Guernsey’s gift to change that categorisation, but rather the World Health Organisation and its latest position is we remain in a pandemic. The situation remains volatile as we approach the uncertainty of winter and with the emergence of a new variant of concern, Omicron.
Nevertheless, we are trying to live responsibly with Covid and trying to minimise its disruption on the lives of members of our community. But this is what living responsibly with Covid means; it means adapting to changing circumstances and us all taking responsibility and making small adjustments where needed to help ensure that life can largely continue unfettered.
We absolutely accept that the needs of children need to be prioritised, and speaking from a CCA perspective we have worked very closely with our colleagues in the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture as they have, working with Public Health, sought to protect staff and young people and minimise the disruption to their education. At the forefront of all considerations and decisions within the Bailiwick was the need to consider the broader role of education in promoting wellbeing, health and safety.
As such, the balance between the specific protection of children and their teachers against infection with SARS-CoV-2, and the wider health and wellbeing of children and young people, was carefully evaluated when considering the exit from the first lockdown in 2020. This focused not only on physical wellbeing, but also mental wellbeing and enabling children and young people to achieve their potential and goals. As such, the States of Guernsey recognised the fundamental importance of children and young people returning to school safely and therefore prioritised a return to school on 8 June 2020, two weeks prior to the entry into Phase 5 of the exit from lockdown. Again after the second lockdown at the start of 2021, schools were prioritised for return and children returned to school with few restrictions.
The opening of the borders inevitably meant that we would see more cases of Covid-19 in the community. Here the impact on children was carefully considered and we opted to treat this group in the same way as vaccinated adults and not isolate them if they were contacts of cases, but to ask them to do daily lateral flow tests to detect infection with SARS-CoV-2. This was to strike a balance of keeping children in school with mitigations to control, as much as is possible, the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19. We are also rolling out the vaccination programme to 12 – 17 year olds to protect them as much as we can.
We absolutely recognise that young people in schools, as our largest group of unvaccinated people, and their families are currently dealing with more disruption to their everyday lives than we would wish, and we thank them all for their continued perseverance. They are absolutely not forgotten; not by me, any member of the CCA or those who advise us. Public Health and Education are in very regular dialogue to ensure that all measures put in place are proportionate and as minimal as possible.
Other than receiving regular updates and providing our support, the CCA has largely remained outside the decision-making process about how we manage the implications of Covid in schools. We have not directed that face coverings be worn in schools, although fully support the decision by the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture to put that policy in place for the time being.
The current arrangements for managing cases of Covid-19 in education settings are designed to limit disruption. I accept your correspondent is of the view that there is too much disruption to young people, but we currently have a situation where only those young people who test positive for Covid-19 or who are symptomatic are kept off school – and we know that many students are currently off school for non-Covid-related sickness as winter bugs make their way around the island. Any student who has been identified as a contact is able to continue going to school, attending out of school activities and living their normal life save for the request that they do a lateral flow test each morning for 10 days. I don’t believe that is an unreasonable imposition on a young person, although I completely understand that some may find it distressing.
I would certainly never support anyone using some of the emotive language your correspondent has reflected in terms of explaining to a young person why they are being asked to take LFTs or stay home if symptomatic.
No one should be trying to emotionally blackmail young people. But we do need to continue making adjustments to adapt to changing circumstances, such as the new variant of concern, or rising case numbers. Rising cases numbers presents a variety of challenges, including the obvious health and wellbeing of our community but also on the island’s ability to keep key services running.
For the time being, this is what living responsibly with the virus looks like – adapting, making reasonable adjustments to help keep the island running.