On the eve of the start of the school year in Israel, parents received at-home tests for COVID to be administered to children. It was the latest twist in what has become 18 months of pandemic chaos and changing government policies, leaving people guessing every week what new restrictions, travel guidelines or other policies might come next. Many people accepted these changing policies as necessary at the beginning of the pandemic because of fear, and because officials lacked knowledge about the nature of the threat.
Israel has been often ahead of the curve on issues such as vaccinations, but it has also performed badly when it comes to high numbers of cases, both last year, in the first months of 2021, and again in August. This despite numerous lockdowns, closing the country to travel, and an unprecedented vaccination drive, including the use of a third booster shot.
Now, struggling to understand what comes next, Israel and other countries appear to be shifting the burden of the pandemic, as well as changing chaotic policies, onto children.
Israel has a lot of children because it is a young society. This effectively means that policies that quarantine kids, or force them to be tested often, affect not only children disproportionately but also put parents in a revolving door of confusing concerns about when they will need to stay home if their kids test positive.
There is a catch-22 in the way the burden of testing, quarantine and mask mandates have fallen on children this year, while vaccinated adults increasingly enjoy semi-freedom.
Guidelines keep children from being vaccinated, while the same guidelines then put high barriers in front of the unvaccinated. This has a dual effect of creating a pool of people who cannot access the key that unlocks the door to things like restaurants, pools and other activities, while providing no way for them to obtain that key. At the same time, an increasingly shrill Western media is filled with voices demanding more bans on the unvaccinated, turning these people into pariahs.
A society that is fearful of its own children and portrays them as “spreading disease” and as a health hazard is fundamentally a society that already has a problem, because children should not be burdened with this stereotype.
That is one problem with the narrative being packaged about children. The wider problem is that there is no exit strategy for those new burdens being placed on children.
When adults were asked to quarantine or be locked down, we generally had a mitigation strategy to eventually relax these guidelines. Today, children have to be tested within 24 hours of using a pool or restaurant or going to some venues. The short time frame before their Green Pass expires creates an impossible situation for them and their parents. Yet, just months ago the adults were going to gyms and pools and restaurants without showing their Green Passes. How is it that children require more tests than the adult population, even the unvaccinated ones, ever did?
The at-home tests ostensibly seemed like a good way to take a national screenshot of the extent of the pandemic among children. However, the tests were not collected by the authorities, meaning in the end it was up to parents to sign a small form to let their children go to school.
While the state was busy testing all the kids but not collecting the results, there was no other demographic group that was ever subjected to a one-day mass test like this. This leaves one wondering: If the government could distribute more than a million tests for kids on the eve of the school year, it could do the same for adults, and could have done the same earlier in the year. But we didn’t. Instead we focus on children and not on adults.
This is not just a question of children being unvaccinated. When adults were not vaccinated, say last December, we didn’t distribute at-home tests for all of them. For some reason, societies have decided that children require more testing and more rules than the adults who have mismanaged this pandemic from the first day.
We are entering a worrying feedback loop of confirmation bias, where we have decided not to vaccinate kids but then increasingly put the spotlight on them as the source of the “spread,” and put barriers on them and force them into frequent testing, with consequent fears of their being sent home to miss school in quarantine – and with no exit strategy from any of this.
In the first year of the pandemic, we focused on protecting the elderly and putting in place draconian lockdowns. Later, we shifted the strategy to mass vaccination of increasingly younger people. Yet even when the adults were almost all vaccinated, and thus safer from developing serious cases of COVID, we continue to see unvaccinated children as a health threat, without investigating the degree of the threat in order to mitigate it.
We appear to be grasping at straws again, like in the spring of 2020. A largely vaccinated country continues to have high numbers of cases but low numbers of serious cases. We’ve singled out our children for mass testing and masking in schools, and put up barriers for them doing basic activities, without any insight into when we might exit this stage of the pandemic. Adults are going to nightclubs, while kids are being tested every day if they want to use a pool. Something about this situation seems untenable.
To escape this contradictory catch-22, we need a better strategy on what comes next for schools and kids. They already lost one year to chaotic remote schooling. Countries in Asia, such as Singapore, are taking pragmatic approaches, and we should begin to do the same, reducing disruptions to children’s lives and not putting more burdens on them than the adults.