Posted on 08/16/2021 9:16:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Sweden's Covid-19 strategy for schools is complex, but nonchalant attitudes and a lack of systematic protection for schoolchildren can only be described as irresponsible, argues Lisa Bjurwald in this opinion piece.
In the US, liberal news media are reporting with horror that several Republican-led states will penalise schools that require masks. This despite the number of infected children soaring, not least in Republican states such as Florida and Texas, and despite leading public health experts including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending universal indoor masking in schools this year.
In Swedish schools, you’d be hard-pressed to find any measures at all, if you don’t count a few bottles of sanitiser here and there and (at least in some schools, and at least in the first months of the pandemic) extra spacious seating in the dining halls. Masks have never been mandatory or even socially accepted here – certainly not in the classrooms. Yet this school year, närundervisning (in-school teaching, or literally “close teaching”) will replace distance learning.
Instructions to schools from the Public Health Agency of Sweden are meek and, just as the Swedish pandemic strategy as a whole, based on “recommendations”, “advice”, “suggestions” and the like, rather than mandatory rules. “If possible, work in smaller groups [than usual],” and so on.
On August 12th, the Public Health Agency and The Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) announced that the possibility of preventive distance learning has been removed. This in the face of renewed spread and mutated strains. As opposed to neighbouring countries Finland and Denmark, Sweden hasn’t lowered the recommended vaccine age to include children, instead sticking with 16 years of age (thus excluding the entire elementary school system).
To some parents, foreign and Swedish-born alike, this idea of business as usual is a relief. Not that they don’t care about their children’s well-being, but rather that the unique Swedish approach to Covid-19 has allowed for young school-aged children to live normal lives during a potentially frightening global crisis.
Many of us who have friends and family abroad know what a toll regular school closings and futile attempts at homeschooling have taken on parents and pupils alike. I have close friends in London who were all nearly having a nervous breakdown at different times during the past year, their young, hyper-energetic broods literally “climbing the walls” (as we say in Sweden) out of frustration.
On the other side of these walls, mums and dads were trying and failing to have serious job conversations over Skype. It would have been funny for a week or two, a story to tell the grandchildren, but months on end, with no end in sight? No wonder European psychiatric helplines have nearly crashed from the number of desperate callers.
But there’s also a group of Sweden-based parents increasingly worried about the country’s lax attitude towards Covid-19, not least in the classrooms. As the new Delta variant of the virus is dominating the spread, and infection rates are increasing in major cities like Stockholm, anxiety is brewing over the return to schools this week.
The message from the Swedish government and Public Health Agency has consistently been that kids don’t get sick from the coronavirus. But reports of Long Covid in children tell a different story. While children fortunately end up in hospital emergency units very rarely, they can develop the same debilitating post-Covid symptoms as adults, including extreme tiredness, recurring fever spells, and frightening cognitive symptoms like “brain fog” with difficulties focusing.
No one knows how long Long Covid lasts. Tens of thousands of those infected in the spring of 2020 around the globe are still suffering from the after-effects. The WHO has acknowledged post-Covid as a global health concern. Networks and organisations for the affected have been set up, clinical research initiated. But the Swedish response has been gruellingly slow, particularly in comparison with countries such as the United Kingdom, where a heap of special post-Covid clinics has been set up to care for the ill.
A recent report from the Swedish Children’s Ombudsman studied the consequences of Covid-19 on children’s rights and found that a surprising number of Swedish children are suffering from severe, life-altering post-Covid symptoms. I write in-depth in Swedish about the report here.
The fact that children can be negatively affected physically by the virus puts the Swedish pandemic school strategy – or lack thereof – in a different light.
A measured, fact-based response is preferable to a gut reaction driven by fear and/or populism, as seen across the world since the outbreak early last year. If children could neither get infected nor spread the potentially deadly disease, schools could pretty much be exempt from preventive measures.
But now, a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, science tells us differently. Children can both spread the virus to vulnerable family members – especially with the sneakier Delta variant – and suffer severe post-Covid symptoms themselves, even if the infection itself was mild.
With this knowledge in mind, the lack of protection for our youngest citizens and the nonchalant attitudes from those in power cannot be described as anything else but irresponsible. I believe that this will be a major issue of regret and reckoning for Sweden in the post-pandemic years.
Well, everybody has an opinion.
Almost zero children have died of it. More have died of lockdown-induced suicide.
Author is a “journalist”.
This is “her” opinion.
I do not believe this is the consensus of those living in Sweden. (my mom was a Swede, born in US)
Who cares? They get to run their country as they see fit.
Opinions are like assholes- every pseudo-intellectual proggie has one.
If this had been written a year ago I would accept it as an opinion. Now I see it as the ramblings of an idiot.
And an ass hole.
“he number of infected children soaring, not least in Republican states such as Florida and Texas,”
just the places Xio Bei Din is sending all the ILLEGALS flooding the border.
Illegal Minors are majorities in any count of ChiCom Wuh stats.
The writer misses it all.
Intentionally.
FWIW - Those Scandinavian kids also ride their bikes to school in the snow. Mostly a pretty hardy genotype.
But the callous indifference to abortion is never brought up! Sorry we are all out of sympathy for the hypocrites who promote this crap!
By the way, speaking of young people, did you see that out of 2.2 million military personnel, a total of 24 have died of COVID? This with 7,000 people stuck together for months on aircraft carriers for one example?
Fauci Face Diapers for the whole planet.
So let it be written. So let it be done.
Brown University study on mask wearing
Mean IQs for children age 3 months to 3 years old dropped from 100 before the pandemic to 79 during it.
It seems to me you’d want kids exposed to COVID at a young age so they’ll have immunity going forward. I raised my kids before there was a vaccination for chicken pox. Parents would often expose their kids to other kids who had chicken pox. You knew they were going to get it sometime - and the disease is worse if you get it when you’re older.
And that's with the significant over counting of deaths from covid
If you are college age or below, your risks from the current strains of covid are vanishingly small.
Sweden didn’t shut down, didn’t close schools and kids didn’t wear masks.
Where are the million deaths? They never happened.
In Sweden, almost zero AT ALL are dying from the disease. It's been a week since they have recorded a single death and nearly two months since they had more than one death in a single day. This woman is delusional.
This is what propaganda looks like. Kid cases are RSV, not covid.
“leading public experts”, really? This term means head government guy. So the head government guy for instance, Fauci, says to do something and we are supposed to take that as fact. Our “leading public military experts” just told us that Kabul would be ok because the Taliban did not have the manpower to take over the country or even the city of Kabul and it happened in a matter of hours.
The top expert in any field rarely works for the government.
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