For the sake of 8 weeks....

[Greentrees2021]

I'm just pondering how 8 weeks ago, DS and all his classmates were pulled out of school mid lesson due to notification of a positive PCR and had to go into 10 days isolation. They didn't get to say goodbye to their school or teachers or friends, they missed their infant leavers party, the last day at the school, the assembly they had all rehearsed, 2 girls had to cancel birthday parties and several had to delay or cancel summer holidays. There were a lot of tears and disappointments for children, parents and families.
Here we are 8 weeks later and quite a number of them have now caught Covid anyway this term and I'm sure it's only a matter of time for those who haven't.
I don't know, it just suddenly seems so pointless and kind of silly what we all went through to just delay catching covid by a few weeks. At the time I was trying to convince myself it was in the kids best interests but now I see it definitely wasn't. Does anyone else feel like this?

@duffeldaisy

Marginal benefit before then looking at long covid and its impact on children's health and education. As the vaccine reduces chances of long covid once you get covid, and also reduces chances of catching it in the first place, then that's all extra benefit on top which should have also been taken into consideration.

Letting it just spread through schools, letting children be ill, or letting them then pass it on to adults around them, making them ill, possibly killing some of them - also has a huge impact not just on children's physical health, but on their mental health too. There are plenty of parents with children who are suffering anxiety about bringing it to a young or clinically vulnerable sibling or family member. That was not taken into account.

Vaccination isn't perfect, but it reduces those worries considerably. Combined with other measures, like other countries, we could manage to avoid many more cases and avoid some of the 200 deaths a day.

You need to weigh up with the harms mitigations bring and also consider the benefit to children as a group.

The harm from most mitigations outweighs the risk from Covid.