My column in today's Indo👇
It’s up to parents to risk-assess, but if we’re not allowed to know if the unmasked kid sitting next to ours who was off sick for a few days has Covid and is potentially still infectious, how can we? Nits we need to be informed of, but a highly infectious neurotropic disease that can cause organ damage, disability and death? That’s an ecumenical matter.
Many parents, sometimes emboldened by mental-health practitioners who should know better, interpret the Government’s removal of public health protections as being outside their locus of control and therefore, succumbing to the “inevitability” of infection is best. For many, due to financial or health precarity, exposure to Covid is increasingly difficult to avoid but an infection is not beneficial to mental health because; a) psychiatric disorders are common post-Covid sequelae, the risk of which increases with every infection and b) mental and physical health are inextricably linked.
Pitting one against the other, instead of advocating for both, is harmful. The World Health Organisation’s Mike Ryan recently spoke of the cumulative impact of repeated infections and negative long-term neurological and other health outcomes, warning: “You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it but you don’t want to get it four times, for sure.”
"I spoke to one of Ireland’s leading children’s rights lawyers, Gareth Noble, who said: “I’m concerned we’re creating a culture of conditioning us to think Covid infections and outbreaks in schools are inevitable. They’re not. We significantly reduce risk for our children if we follow basic public health advice such as mask-wearing, contact tracing, air filtration and other measures. Any expert advice from the WHO needs to be considered and actioned. Ignoring it would be negligent.”
Interim chief medical officer Professor Breda Smyth needs to explain why she has not adopted WHO guidance in her advice to government.
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