“On the other hand if you're in an area where there are now 500 new cases a day and your child has symptoms which might be allergies, but could be Covid, then you're going to test them for the virus,” she says. For instance, if a child suffers from hay fever every fall, has not been exposed to someone with the virus, and is in an area where there's not an outbreak, then Fisher says there may not be a reason to have them checked. About 3.3 million adults older than 65, those most vulnerable to the virus, live with a school-age child.Įven if a child probably just has a cold, the mere possibility that they could transmit Covid at school to another child who lives with their grandparents presents a dilemma at the core of public health recommendations.Īccording to Margaret Fisher, a pediatric infectious disease researcher and professor at the Drexel University College of Medicine, the incidence of the virus within a community is important context for testing. Children rarely die from the virus so public health officials have mostly focused their concern on whether they can be infected at school and then transmit it at home. An earlier CDC study of schoolchildren issued in September found that 63 percent of cases were in children aged 12 to 17 while 37 percent were in those aged 5 to 11. Nearly 490,000 children under 18 in the United States have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Even if they don’t have Covid, you don’t want to be spreading that around in school.” “But you just don't want to take that risk. “The likelihood that every sick person has Covid is low,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). What should parents do if a child has one or more of those symptoms? Keep them home. Illness in children with Covid-19 is more serious and can include diarrhea or congestion as well as the loss of taste or smell, fatigue, headache and sore throat. It’s not easy to distinguish between common Covid-19 symptoms like a cough or a fever with symptoms of the common cold or flu. "Your kid could be coughing and sneezing and sitting next to my kid (in class), and your kid could have Covid.” That's what makes this so tough,” says Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Safe and Healthy Schools says. “Inevitably, kids go to school all the time when they're sick. What should parents do not knowing whether a fever is just a cold or flu, or an indicator of Covid-19? Should they test their child? If so, when? And even if their children test negative, how long should parents and their children isolate before returning to work or to school? This year, those same symptoms could be a more ominous signal. Inconvenient for child and parent, but not usually serious. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, parents of schoolchildren approached winter expecting they’d have to grapple with seasonal ailments: the common cold or the flu, their arrival announced by stuffy noses, sore throats, coughs and low-grade fevers.
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