Return to Schools: 9 Big Questions Parents Should Ask in A Pandemic
Updated 23 June 2024
Re-joining Schools...in Health
What can we learn from the lockdowns?
Children-specific data
Understanding new measures and the contexts for their efficacy
Are schools more or less supportive spaces?
EMFs in the school
Outdoor, movement, and free play
Access to fresh air and natural light
Interaction with peers, teachers, community
Masks and other medical protocols
“New Normals” for the school setting?
My children’s health is top of my priority as a parent, which includes how well they are taking to their environment and how it affects their development. I approach re-entering schools for my children like any geeky parent: a lot of research and clarifying concerns and priorities. For this reason, I updated this post with new information to you to consider as a parent concerned about your children’s health.
Schools are being reopened with new guidelines as lockdowns lift. Most of these protocols and practices are geared towards a “new normal”, imposing measures that we are experiencing in other spaces: face masks, continual sanitisation, and chemical disinfection, the removal and/or restrictions of outdoor time and the social distancing.
What can we learn from the lockdowns? (On parents’ biggest concerns about school)
In various countries, there were different shades and gradations to the lockdowns, but all of them emphasised staying indoors and avoiding social contact. This meant we miss out on the health-boosting elements of nature and positive social interaction.
If there's one thing the lockdowns are showing us, it is that our immune health, as well as our communities, thrive in environments that support, instead of restrict, our biological needs.
Although the virus remains to be found or isolated, helpful data is emerging. Firstly, and fortunately, it is less infectious and less deadly than we thought:
Up to 80% of all who tested positive remain symptom-free. Most people have been spreading this virus while asymptomatic for months.
However, even if there is some asymptotic transmission, in all the history of respiratory viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. WHO declared in June 2020 that the transmission of disease from asymptomatic people is rare.
Though estimates are variable by region, the death rate for the disease could be in the range of 0.1%, well below earlier WHO estimates of 3.4%. This is close to seasonal flu rates, especially compared to other coronaviruses.
The median age of mortality is over 80 years, with somewhere between 96-99% having at least 1 co-morbidity factor and 50% having at least 3 co-morbidity factors, including type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and heart disease and cancer. On average, around the world, up to 2/3s of deaths occurred in nursing homes.
The fatality rate is 0.05 in persons 70 years old and under (range: 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations; with a corrected median of 0.04%), which compares quite well to the IFR of most influenza viruses.
The death rates fall drastically in countries with higher testing, for example just 0.6% in South Korea, where more than 1,100 tests have been administered per million residents.
It infrequently infects children and they are also less likely to pass it to others, which supports the reopening of schools.
If you have had the illness, you gain natural immunity for life.
A population can achieve some sort of immunity to the virus with as little as 20% infected—a proportion well below the widely accepted herd immunity threshold (60-70%).
People with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection do not get additional benefits from vaccination.
Data related to Children
There is no scientific evidence to suggest a medical reason for the closure of schools as the risk of disease and transmission in children is close to zero.
Countries that had reopened their schools in May 2020 saw no increases in cases of infection. Sweden, which never closed its primary schools had no increase in the incidence of COVID-19 cases in children.
The German Medical Association has stated that COVID-19 is a minimal or mild risk to children and the middle schools and daycares should be open without restriction.
In light of these, we can say the main protection against COVID-19 is being healthy and maintaining a healthy terrain, which includes a healthy body, immune system, and emotions. In Northern Italy, the death rate among healthy elderly was 0.8%.
In another post, I summarised some of the measures taken for Covid-19 since it was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, as well as how our routines at home can keep ourselves safe and healthy.
Understandably, there is continued concern, and parents may be anxious about restrictive measures too. Schools are adopting different processes as a way to reassure parents that they are reopening safely. These include:
Social distance
Masks
Cancelling celebrations and rituals
Rush to digital schooling
Staying indoors / Staying at home
Avoid social spaces
Greet and meet people through plastic barriers
As a parent myself who is greatly focused on optimal health and happiness for my children, I will be weighing the impact and risks of these measures. Here are some ideas that I will be considering for a happy return to schooling – and a biologically safe and supportive one.
If you considering whether to send your child to school again, take this opportunity to familiarise yourself with the environmental elements and learn about electromagnetic safety. Then, take time to consider each element in your child’s school to determine the best options for your child.
1. Is the school free of WiFi?
Artificial ambient electromagnetic fields can weaken immune system function, which increases risks of opportunistic infection, including viral (i.e., Epstein-Barr, coronaviruses), atypical bacterial (Nocardia, Listeria, mycobacterial, mycoplasma), and parasitic (e.g., toxoplasmosis) infections. Researchers are still understanding the mechanisms for how this happens.
Regardless, we do know prolonged exposure to electromagnetic radiation has detrimental biological effects especially for children. Children’s developing brains are at higher risk for wireless injury, including chromosomal DNA damage. Knowing whether the school and classroom areas have WiFi is a good gauge on whether children are being unnecessarily exposed to wireless radiation during their many hours in school.
Does the school has wifi in the classrooms? In the school public areas?
Can the school turn off or hardwire its wireless devices, in where the children congregate and learn?
If not, can this be done in the classroom at least?
Does the school reconsider sunlight and outdoor exposure (for vitamin D and general immunity) as a measure for viral infections?
2. Has the school changed its approach to screentime?
The lockdowns ushered in even greater digitisation as schools, even preschools, scrambled to provide online lessons. Screen-time can be a slippery slope—negotiating appropriate content, interruptions to real-life routines, outdoors, and ergonomics, LED dangers, and electromagnetic safety. Screen-centred learning is the new "Wild West", especially across Australasia.
A worldwide survey looked at Covid lockdowns and remote learning on screens, asking whether optometrists are seeing increasing speed of the development of nearsightedness (myopia) in children (Hussey E, Vreven L, Pang Y, Taub MB. If a Tree Falls, Is It an Epidemic? Results of the OEPF Online COVID-and-Myopia Survey. Optometry & Visual Performance 2022;1(COVID):52-4).
The answer was a resounding “yes”. Basically, children spending hours looking at a screen instead of running around with their friends at school, meant their eyes were kept in a sustained focusing effort at near distance, leading to myopia.
After months of mandatory lockdowns, the extent and duration of exposure to EMF and blue light has become unprecedented. Rather than blindly taking on this new normal, parents and educators could take this chance to see how increasing digitisation can be done safely for children.
Does the school favour adopting more screen-centred learning in schools, with or without the the installation of WiFi? Or does it preserve a traditional setting with a precautionary approach towards screens?
Will the school increase or decrease digitisation in their own curriculum in school?
Will the school delineate the difference between digital home learning and school curriculum, and make sure digital lessons are not detracting from their curricula and culture?
Does the school employ evidence-based science and distinguish screen-time appropriateness between age groups? For example, cartoons, with their quick cuts, have been shown to reduce the attention spans and other executive functions of preschoolers.
3. Will the school maintain or increase outdoor playtime?
Outdoor play is qualitatively different from indoors. Child development experts recommend a minimum of one hour outdoors daily. This outdoor playtime does not have to be complicated – in fact, the simpler and more open-ended outdoor play is, the more children learn and develop calm observation.
Sunlight, Vitamin D, and the Covid19 connection
Multiple studies show that, like all viruses, the coronavirus disintegrates quickly outdoors, even within minutes. The data shows that being outside is safer than being inside, where we're forced physically closer together and ventilation systems are a known culprit in spreading infection.
Countries such as Denmark and Italy, ahead of state guidelines, have moved lessons outdoors rather than rely on distance learning, one of the WHO’s recommended measures for reopening schools, corresponding to research that suggests the large majority of infections occur indoors.
Many doctors are becoming aware of the potential of vitamin D to boost immunity at this vital time. The upshot is we've always known humans do better outside than in many of the enclosed environments we've built for ourselves.
Research, including from right here in tropical southeast Asia, is showing this clearly:
Indonesia: Of those who died, most (85%) had a co-morbidity. Even more than that, 96% had low vitamin D levels. After controlling for known risk like being old, or male or having high blood pressure, a Vitamin D level described as deficient (less than 20ng/ml) was associated with a 10 fold greater risk of death. In most medical studies an OR (odds ratio) as low as 1.3 is notable enough to get published. But these are OR’s of 10.
Similarly in a study from the Philippines: University of Southeastern Philippines evaluated the vitamin D blood levels of 212 people diagnosed with COVID-19 and found the blood level of vitamin D was lowest in those in critical condition and highest in those with a milder infection.
Singapore: Patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 on just the standard treatment had a significant disadvantage as judged by deterioration and need for oxygen therapy. Patients with Covid19 were randomly allocated to standard treatment or standard treatment plus treatment with a combination of Vitamin D, Magnesium, and Vitamin B12. 43 consecutive COVID-19 patients aged ≥50 were studied.
USA: Correlation between COVID-19 mortality among African-Americans across the USA and northern latitude.
"Vitamin D is an unusual vitamin—it is a hormone and we get most of it by the action of ultraviolet light on cholesterol in the skin.
Unless you live in a sunny country or eat a very large amount of oily fish you are quite likely to need supplements to maintain a normal level. It is plausible that vitamin D deficiency increases risk of severe COVID-19 illness, but all the evidence is indirect. The correlation between COVID-19 mortality and northern latitude, with consequently reduced ultraviolet exposure from sunlight, adds to this evidence."— Professor Jon Rhodes, emeritus professor of medicine, University of Liverpool
4. Is there access to fresh air and natural light in the classroom?
Larger and more windows allow natural light into the classroom, which is a departure from "box-type" rooms. However, such light is still qualitatively different from natural light outdoors, as glass filters and distorts its natural wavelengths. Light is a primary signal to our biology. We need light in its natural state (sunlight) as its timing, intensity, duration, and wavelength affect the human biological clock.
Clean fresh air, from outdoors or through a ventilation system, improves air quality in an enclosed space.
Sunlight carries UV which is a natural disinfectant and potent against coronaviruses.
Do classrooms have windows that can be opened? Do they allow adequate natural sunlight?
Is there natural ventilation in the classroom?
Are there air filters in classroom?
5. How will children interact with their teachers?
Creating a friendly environment supports a child’s sense of security and confidence in him/herself and in the world. Peers and teachers in the classroom form the primary models for how we relate.
If teachers will wear masks and perform other protocols, how will it be communicated to the children?
If no masks are required at school, how will teachers explain this in the context of lockdowns?
6. How will the children interact and play with their classmates?
Play is a self-tuning mechanism for the brain. Children are wired to seek approval and mirror socially acceptable behaviour.
Post Covid-19 is challenging a lot of what we take for granted about what make spaces great. A child's account from the UK reveals sometimes bewildering changes in how children play, think, and react to others and their sense of the world.
What new rules being introduced to the usual playtime timetable?
Will the school consider other concessions to preserve free play?
7. Are children required to wear masks at school? If so, how and when is this required?
It is already documented that having infants surrounded by masked people may interfere with the development of detecting faces and facial nuance, which includes emotion. If face detection development is, in fact, impaired, it may be irreparable. Masking may be irreparably harming our children, impairing the ability to perceive emotions in the faces of others.
Update in 2024: The evidence against mask wearing, especially for children, is substantial. You can read some of the alarming research summarised here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23.
By now, we know that viruses are so small that wearing a surgical mask offers little protection that way. Surgical masks (and fabric type masks) only reduce droplets from spraying a distance, but healthy (asymptomatic) people do not have enough viral load to to shed anyway. For example, the pore size of cloth face coverings range from ~ 20-100 microns. Viruses are 200-1,000x smaller than that at 0.1 microns.
Are the costs balanced with any perceived protection against infections? Given what we now know, requiring students to wear masks and submit to daily temperature checks may not be worth the logistical and physical-emotional costs.
In a published list of recommendations from one of Canada’s leading children’s Hospitals , the advisory group advising against the use of face masks for students, listing several factors that could make mask wearing unsafe for children instead, such as:
Masks can worsen breathing difficulties. A fraction of carbon dioxide previously exhaled is inhaled at each respiratory cycle. These two factors increase breathing frequency and deepness, and hence increase the amount of inhaled and exhaled air. This may worsen the burden of covid-19 if infected people wearing masks spread more contaminated air. This may also worsen the clinical condition of infected people if the enhanced breathing pushes the viral load down into their lungs.
Studies show that wearing a face covering reduces blood and tissue oxygenation — which can be deadly — while increasing carbon dioxide levels. OSHA’s (US) Respiratory Protection Standards state: “oxygen levels below 19.5% are an immediate danger to life or health.”
Even the most esteemed medical journals admit their purpose is to calm anxiety. Masks obscure how we communicate intent and tone. For very small children, could they be missing out on this element?
The US CDC’s own February 2021 double-mask study reported that masking may impede breathing – which can trigger a variety of other problems including acute anxiety attacks in susceptible individuals. These harms are even more likely to occur to children, particularly smaller children.
The WHO and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) advises that young children below the age of six should not be made to mask as they do not have the coordination necessary for the proper use of masks. In light of this, some countries have revised guidelines too for children under twelve. (Image of the advisory in resources at the bottom of this post.)
Mask-wearing can also increase the risk of infection and the spread of viral illness, hinder detoxification that occurs via exhalation, and impair the immune system.
New study on masks, showing negative health effects from high levels of CO2 and reduced oxygen. The ppm of carbon dioxide in inhaled air under surgical and filtering facepiece 2 (FFP2) masks is higher than what is already deemed unacceptable by the German Federal Environmental Office by a factor of 6. This was a value reached after 3 minutes of measurement. The youngest children had the highest values, with one 7-year-old child’s carbon dioxide level measured at 25 000 ppm.
— JAMA
Moreover, some masks have been found to contain known carcinogens (most cartons have a warning label), which puts another load on small children from inhaling toxic chemicals and having them come into contact with their more sensitive skin.
“Schools are probably not greatly amplifying the spread of the virus. (…) elementary school grades focus on hand washing and use outdoor spaces when possible (and) address psychosocial and mental and behavioral needs of children, including the effect of separation from their peers.” — American Academy of Pediatrics California, which represents more than 5,000 doctors, released their own school reopening recommendations.
Are masks mandatory? If so, in which situations and for how long? Are the classroom teachers trained to spot “mask fatigue”?
Does the school take approaches to reduce the wearing of masks, e.g., preferring outdoor activities, maintaining smaller groups?
8. What kind of interaction and community will the school encourage?
Being forced to isolate, and hold back on physical contact, can be especially hard on children, who cannot yet rationalise.
Play, touch, and spontaneity bring an element of human warmth to communication that can be lacking in a time when digital means dominate.
Mixing and mining is equally an important part of developing immune system.
Being cocooned from the public with the argument of avoiding specific viruses could leave people dangerously vulnerable to new viruses.
If the school enforces social distancing, are there considerations for children with developing/development sensitivities?
In particular, what activities is the school providing for special education students who rely on instructional aides; autistic students who are prone to hypersensitivity; and students with respiratory issues and anxiety?
10. What is the school protocol should possible cases arise?
Tests to accurately detect SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, even within the blood samples of persons who have been previously diagnosed with COVID-19, via nasal swab diagnostic testing, have been unreliable.
What is the school protocol if a student or teacher tests positive?
Will parents be able to choose where to take their children for medical advice, testing, and treatment, should they choose?
Re-joining in health: Alternatives for the school setting
This can be a stressful time. As a parent, I became very aware of how the changing spaces and perspectives around the “new normal” was affecting my children, and we all know children are absolute sponges!
At the same time, I don’t think we ought to treat each other, and children, as bags of ‘viruses’ just waiting to spew their contents on others. This leaves a harm in the psyche that may have effects that we have yet unseen. The words, actions, and the spaces we use in turn shape our children’s biology.
But we can choose “new normals” that support, rather than restrict, resilient, healthier communities. Children benefit from being in a social and friendly environment and in a formal learning environment.
Think about your school environment and how children could thrive in it. Imagine how it looks like. As parents, educators, and leaders of educational groups, we are custodians of children, living and working in the same spaces—and can glean the gaps are emerging evident since recent lockdowns.
Getting to know your school network is essential now as you consider changes, by yourself and by possible new guidelines, for your child. Talk to your partner, your child’s teachers, administrators, as well as other parents as needed. With an open dialogue, everyone can consider better alternatives for a better learning environment for our children and our collective health.
are you a parent and/or a teacher? Get in touch for a FREE discovery chat on how we can create better spaces in the school for our children’s optimal development.
click here to save these questions in a checklist — for ANY school or educational setting, anytime.
If you are doing online learning and classes from home, stay safe against harmful electromagnetic radiation and take the #greatwiredexperiment. (The guide is free!)
Building Biology Resources:
The Building Biology Principles | EMF-Safety: #TheGreatWiredExperiment | EMF Quotes
Follow Building Biology Asia via email using the form field below this post or on social media: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
References & Resources:
