In case a year of bare-bones schooling, limited or no time with friends and drastically curtailed or canceled activities and sports didn’t make the city’s kids suffer enough, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has some new ideas for how to make the coming summer terrible for them, too.
On Wednesday, the gov announced new guidelines for kids attending any “child care, day camp or overnight camp program” this summer. Predictably, the rules are largely useless. And cruel.
For starters, the guidelines are tighter than those imposed last summer, at the peak of the pandemic. Back then, despite enormous alarm after the pandemic’s outbreak and sudden spikes in hospitalizations and deaths, New York kids weren’t required to wear masks at summer camps. This summer, with three vaccines rapidly making their way through the population and COVID cases and transmission rates dramatically lower, the Department of Health has reversed course and tightened mask rules at camps, forcing kids to wear them for most activities.
It’s pointless. Kids have been shown again and again not to be significant spreaders of the virus. When they do contract it, they rarely have serious symptoms. As for sensational headlines about children sent to the hospital with the bug, two recent studies found that pediatric hospitalizations for COVID-19 were overcounted by at least 40 percent.
The madness doesn’t stop there. This month, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “The risk when you’re outdoors — which we have been saying all along — is extremely low.” He had not, of course, been saying that all along. But most people know that now. So why are we continuing to make and follow policies that go against what we know?
The guidance also basically contradicts itself. It notes: “Responsible parties must ensure that children/campers age two and older and staff who are not fully vaccinated wear face coverings except when eating, drinking, showering, swimming or sleeping/resting.”
Think about that: Kids at sleepaway camps will be maskless when they share a bunkbed indoors but forced to cover up when they’re with the very same kids outdoors, where the risk is — again, according to Fauci — “extremely low.” Three-year-olds will spend naptime maskless, asleep in a room with their friends, only to have to put the mask back on when outside.
It’s policy so absurd only nameless bureaucrats could come up with it.
“We are continuing to make incredible progress against COVID and lifting restrictions based on the science and numbers, but we are not yet at the finished line,” Cuomo huffed, as he rolled out the ridiculous camp guidelines.
Well, OK, let’s see him put on a mask and keep it on for eight hours in the heat outside all summer. Play dodgeball in it. Do relay races. Put it on after getting out of the pool.
Maybe even better, make one of his daughters do all that. OK, she’s been vaccinated so she doesn’t need a mask. But kids never really needed to take extraordinary precautions even without being jabbed either — at least for most outdoor activities. Kids under 12 in Europe largely never wore masks, including while they were in schools.
Yet here, we mask kids as young as 2, inside and out. That likely did them a net disservice, and now we’re aggravating the harm with policies that make no scientific sense.
Masking children sends a ridiculous message: We reject science. We know that outdoor spread is rare, that children seldom contract, spread or have bad reactions from COVID and that the positivity rate in the country is extremely low — but we are not making decisions based on any of that information.
Parents who’ve spent the year sitting on the sidelines while harmful, stupid policies were forced upon them should finally speak up for their children. Take your “In this house we believe in science” signs and prove it.
Tell the governor and his Department of Health to make guidelines that make sense and rely on science instead of bureaucratic whim. Tell them to do it now, and spare kids a summer of mask hell.
Twitter: @Karol