Children of color have borne the brunt of this pandemic. And a new report that was released by the Kaiser family foundation, which a lot of people already knew, but they showed that black and Hispanic children are more likely to be hospitalized, more likely to have the consequence of one of the consequences of COVID-19 called the multi-system inflammatory syndrome, or M I S C, which is sometimes a deadly condition where different parts of the body can be inflamed. Like your kidneys, your lungs, your brain, your heart. It also showed that black children were more likely to be admitted to intensive care units due to MISC. Hispanic, black, and American Indian children had higher rates of death from COVID were less likely to have been tested for COVID and vaccinated from COVID.
If you think about it too, because communities of color have been affected overall, they’re more likely to be orphaned from COVID. And now we’re sending our children back to school. So, you know, the other half of this is that black and Hispanic parents are more likely to say that their household suffered a job disruption due to childcare needs in the past year. And the disruption has had a major impact on their family’s finance and stress levels. So having in-person school is crucial for interrupting the cycle. So we have these two sort of things that we have to weigh. Luckily we have two fantastic guests tonight to help us walk through this issue of school reopening. They’re both friends of the show. They’ve both been here before. So I want to start off by reintroducing you to Dr. Nardos King, who is president elect of the national Alliance of black school educators. She has 25 plus years as an educator, and now serves as the assistant superintendent in a large school district in Northern Virginia. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. King. We also have with us Dr. Alondra Hancock, who is a pediatrician, a public health expert, and a mom. She continues to be a tireless advocate for public health reform education and fighting childhood obesity.
BDO – Dr. Mel:
What are the risks of going back to school right now?
Dr. Hancock:
What we know with COVID is that when there are high levels of transmission, it increases the risk of our little ones acquiring COVID based on data that we’ve had since the beginning of the pandemic, we know that children are more likely to acquire COVID-19 from adults than they are from their peers. And so the more transmission that we see within adult populations puts our children at increased at baseline, but when you’re dealing with it more infectious variant, we know from the data that the Delta variant has a thousand percent more virus in it than the original COVID 19, that the are not, or the risk of infecting. Someone goes from, uh, having one person being able to infect two-and-a-half people with the original COVID virus. Every five days with a Delta variant, one person can infect up to seven people every five days. And so when you think about that in the context of sending our little ones back to school, especially when the entire country looks like it’s on fire.
When we look at the daily average number of new cases per 100,000 residents, we can compare state to state and territory to territory across the country. Last, I checked at least 49 states and us territories had higher than 25 new cases per 100,000 residents, which puts us in the red zone. That is what the CDC, defines as a high risk area. So almost all of the country outside of new England, California and Maryland are technically high-risk according to the CDC. So in the face of that, we’re bringing our children back to school.
BDO – Dr. Mel:…
That sums up the risks and makes you wonder, well, why are we doing this now? So Dr. King, why are we insisting on opening schools in the midst of this pandemic? What’s your perspective as an educator?
Dr. King:
After the last 18 months, uh, we realized that kids need to be in school for many reasons, right? It’s the best learning environment for kids, for social, emotional issues that our kids have suffered this past 18 months. They need to be around their peers. They need to be around trusted adults. Um, you know, the pandemic has weighed heavy on them, so it is important for students to be back in school. And I think that we’ve learned over the last 18 months, how the mitigation strategies can work when you enforce them in your schools. I know in the state that I work in, the state legislator has passed the law, that all schools in the state of Virginia, um, are required to offer five days of in-person learning for parents who want it. So it’s really difficult for schools to stand up. What we did last year, which was a hybrid model that weighed heavy on teacher workload. We weren’t ready for that. And so we were determined to open safely this year, using the mitigation strategies that we learned, like I said, over the last 18 months. And because we know it’s important to get students back in school.
BDO – Dr. Mel:
And you mentioned mitigation strategies. Can you mention some of the ones that your school district, um, has done?
Dr. King:
We require that everybody inside the school building where masks, we recommend that when kids are out in the playground that they wear masks, but we don’t mandate it outside. We are still having children wash their hands regularly. We have hand sanitizer all over our schools and, to the greatest extent possible to continue to maintain three feet and six feet distancing, six feet without your mask, when they’re in the cafeteria and three feet, when they’re in the classroom. So we’re using those mitigation strategies and for the most part they’re working, it doesn’t mean that we’re not without COVID in our schools, because we definitely have cases of children having COVID and adults in our schools. But as large as the district that I work in is, we really still have low cases compared to the number of students that we have in our district. So I truly believe that vaccinations work because at our high school and middle school levels, we see lower cases than we do at our elementary schools where children are not vaccinated.
BDO – Dr. Mel:
Dr. Alondra, what do you think about the Pfizer announcement today about the vaccine being safe and effective for children age five to 11… if those are approved, do you think that they should be mandated for that age group?
Dr. Hancock:
That’s an excellent question. You know, the first question that I would ask is really being able to critically analyze the data so that we can delay parental concerns I’ve received at least seven or eight text messages just today asking what is the risk of myocarditus in the five to 11 year old group, as you guys likely know, we did not discover an elevated risk of myocarditis in the adolescent population until the vaccine was made available to the general public. And so that’s the first question that I need to answer for my parents before I can say whether or not a vaccine like COVID is mandated clearly in the pediatric population. There are a ton of vaccines that are already mandated before a child can enter into and then continue in school. So vaccine mandates in the pediatric space are nothing new. We now see a bouncy mandate for the HPV vaccine.
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