New COVID-19 Concerns After Pair of British Columbia Schools Outbreaks, Child Cases Rising | The Canadian News

BC classroom safety is back in the spotlight after two COVID-19 outbreaks were declared in Lower Mainland schools this week.

Chilliwack Promontory Elementary went into remote learning on Wednesday after at least 20 cases were detected in staff and students, and on Friday, Fraser Health declared an outbreak at Maple Ridge Christian School, where 32 cases emerged.

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The outbreaks worry parents like Claude Martins, a member of the Safe Schools Coalition BC.

Martins has two children in elementary school in Vancouver and says he worries that a similar situation could happen at his school.

He is particularly concerned that one of his daughters may contract COVID-19 at school and take him home to his immunosuppressed wife.

“It is the largest percentage of our population that cannot receive the vaccine until it is approved for that age group. I feel that school-age children and schools in general should be treated the same way that we treat long-term care facilities, where we have vaccinations mandates for staff, ”he said.

“We need to observe those same types of protocols for our educational settings, as well as a mask mandate for all of our staff and all students who attend schools.”

With more than 80 percent of eligible people now fully vaccinated in British Columbia, the province’s cases are increasingly being diagnosed in younger children.

Children under the age of nine have doubled from nine percent of cases in early September to 18 percent of cases this week. In each of the last three reporting days, more than 100 new cases have involved children nine years old and younger.

While the incidence of serious illness from COVID-19 is lower in children than in adults, Martins said that at some point that stops matters.

“The severity in that age group can be low, but if the percentages increase, then there are more and more children who really have serious complications,” he said. “For those families, those platitudes will not be useful.”

The provincial government maintains that the risk to children is low and has persisted with its near-normal back-to-school plan, which does not include class cohorts or masks for children in kindergarten through third grade.

The province only announced this week that it would resume notifying schools and parents about COVID-19 exposures.

“Unless some kind of additional mitigation is added to schools, we will continue to see those numbers rise,” Vancouver physician Dr. Anna Wolak told Global News.

He pointed to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Infection, which showed that schools without a K-12 mask mandate had a 3.5 times higher rate of COVID-19 cases.

“We are already seeing groups. We didn’t see groups, we didn’t see groups that early in the school year when we came back last year. Whether it has to do with Delta and its higher transmissibility or lower protocols, it’s hard to say, “he said.

The union representing BC teachers wants masks to be mandatory for younger children, along with more ventilation improvements and a clear protocol to quickly switch to online learning.

Martins wants all of those measures in place, along with more transparency about the COVID-19 situation at his children’s school.

“I don’t feel like they took it seriously,” he said.

“My biggest fear is that we are just being reactive, that we will just continue to take action two weeks later … We hope that our leadership will provide information and provide safety precautions, rather than having to rely on parents in the community to collaborate on this. “.

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