Save the School Nurse
Save the School Nurse
Two school emails about COVID and flu show just how far we've fallen
Two emails sent yesterday to parents at a Chicagoland private school show us how illogical the overreaction to Covid-19 has become — and how much school nurses need to be saved from looking bad on the historical record of this pandemic-response.
Email 1: Covid!
Both messages are health notices to middle school parents.
The first email is about a Covid “case”.
We don’t know if the students actually sick, or has simply tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, but more than one “close contact” was identified. Contacts who are unvaccinated, regardless of symptoms, and vaccinated contacts with symptoms must quarantine. Asymptomatic vaccinated contacts don’t. (FYI, an Oklahoma judge recently called this approach “irrational”.)
The nurse conveys the same kind of urgency and importance we hear from panicked public health & elected officials. We see the implicit beliefs of her religious school’s stance toward Covid in how she
asks everyone to pray for the students & families,
calls on students to stay “vigilant” and exercise “diligence,” toward the mission of keeping everyone “safe” (read: Covid-free),
signs off with a prayer for health and peace.
If an alien visitor read this email without knowing anything about Covid, he could be forgiven for believing that this virus is life-threatening, or at least a very severe illness, based on the gravity of the nurse’s message.
The alien also might think that students who are vaccinated have a force field around them that prevents virus transmission, while unvaccinated students are dangerous vectors that must be removed, lest they taint or become tainted. Neither is true.
To be fair, this email is similar in tone and text to emails that millions of parents around the country have received from their schools since fall 2020. Save for the religious language, it’s not unique.
Email 2: Flu-Covid!
Now for the second email, sent the same day.
So, flu is back. My guess is that this student is actually sick, because flu testing for asymptomatic people isn’t a thing (nor should it be…Covid same). No mention of close contacts, quarantining, or shots.
What’s REALLY fascinating though is how the nurse immediately jumps to Covid.
Flu is “just flu,” unless it might be Covid. She also pushes parents to get students tested for flu and Covid, should they exhibit any one of a laundry list of overlapping symptoms — none of which are telltale.
Maybe I’m alone, but if my kid is sick with anything, I don’t rush to get her tested. A test is only needed if diagnosis is important to treat the patient. Suffice to say, the push to test for Covid, for the sake of seeing if the symptoms might be Covid, is a reason we can’t seem to get off the crazy train. Neither symptoms nor “exposure” to a person who has tested positive for a pathogen create a moral or ethical obligation to get tested. Sadly, even religious schools have been led astray on this point.
The last paragraph is interesting too. Well-wishes for Christmas, with a call to “partnership and prayers” for health. In my experience, “partnership” is private-school code for “do what we tell you to do,” which in this case, probably involves following all manner of protocols and rituals.
The implication: Make sure your kids don’t commit the sin of getting Covid. How the school defends this message theologically, I’m not sure. But it’s a troubling sign of a monumental shift in how people think about sickness & wellness.
Just Like Flu?
The parent who sent me these emails saw an opportunity. She replied to the nurse’s flu email with obvious questions:
Thank you for sending out the health status emails. I'm curious, if [my child] is diagnosed with the flu, will [s/he] be required to quarantine?
Would whether or not [s/he] had the flu shot prior to infection impact whether or not [s/he] must remain at home?
Perfect, right?
The response:
If [child] was diagnosed with the flu, [s/he] would only need to stay home until [s/he] is fever-free for 24 hours with fever reducing medication.
Typically, the flu vaccines lessen the symptoms of the flu, depending on how well they were able to predict the common strains at the time it was made.
I love how much sense that makes, don’t you?
So, why can’t the same mindset and protocol apply to that “other” endemic seasonal respiratory virus for which a shot and treatments are available, and that presents little risk of severe outcomes for kids and most adults?
Before you say flu is different when it comes to potentially infectiousness and spread, read the CDC’s take on that. Pretty sure that excluding kids from school for a minimum of 5-7 days, and requiring close contacts to do likewise, has never happened, despite flu being riskier for children.
As for school closures, do a search of news articles about schools shutting down due to illness outbreaks. Usually took 15%+ of actually-sick kids & staff for a Superintendent to decide closing for a couple days was needed. (Or 30%, in the case of a 2017 norovirus outbreak at one high school.)
That’s a sharp contrast with prevailing protocols in the most Covid-Centric parts of the country.
If we should be praying for something, it should be that the cause of any symptoms a kid has this winter is anything but Covid. Diagnosis with any other circulating pathogens doesn’t result in an artificial number of required days home from school for either the actually-sick student or the students who were allegedly “exposed.”
A Way Forward
My “path forward” for this private school — and every school in the country — may shock you, but it’s exactly what we did before CovidMania set in.
Makes perfect sense, and there’s no reason we can’t do this everywhere now.
Trust me: Your school nurse* will be relieved.