Essay on Pandemic and Children 8n 200 to 250
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On a normal day, this would have been a perfect way to spend a few quiet moments bonding with my 10-year-old. But it is 7 am, when I am in the bathroom trying to start another day of curfew with some me-time.
With the nation-wide lockdown firmly in place, families are struggling with having their children at home all day. Happily, for many, school exams are cancelled and the pressure to study has been taken away for now. Yet summer looms.
The minute lockdown orders were issued, parents panicked. What would our kids do all day, especially if they could not go out to play? No playdates, no summer camp, no office to escape to. All that time stuck at home — that is something to worry about, in addition to spying on elderly parents determined to go out to chat with the neighbours.
When today’s children and adolescents grow up, will they see themselves as a “lost generation”, whose lives will forever fall in the shadow of a global pandemic?
The school closures are one of the most visible – and controversial – means by which Covid-19 is affecting young people. According to Unesco, the education of nearly 1.6 billion pupils in 190 countries has so far been affected – that’s 90% of the world’s school-age children. And at the time of writing, there are still no definite plans for opening the schools of around half of these children.
There has been much debate over the exact role that school closures have played containing the overall spread of the virus. It is just over five months since the novel coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, meaning that the data describing its transmission and the effects of any particular measure are still patchy.
But according to Richard Armitage, in the division of public health and epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, those legitimate scientific questions about the effectiveness of school closures should not be taken as a justification for re-opening them prematurely. “An absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence,” he says.
We know, after all, that transmission is higher in densely-packed, indoor spaces, and although the danger to children may not be as high as the risk to the adults teaching them, the virus does seem to evoke an extreme reaction in a very small number of paediatric cases. Crucially, children may become carriers who transmit the virus to the most vulnerable members of society, such as their grandparents. After all, they’re not exactly known for their fastidious hygiene.
All of which may make a full return to normality unlikely for most children in the next few months. And when that is combined with the other stresses of living in isolation under quarantine, it may have some serious consequences – delaying their cognitive, emotional and social development. For those in the most critical periods of adolescence, it may even increase the risk of mental illness.
Since the poorest will be hardest hit by all of these effects, lockdowns are expected to widen the existing inequalities across the globe, with repercussions for years to come. “It’s disadvantaged children who pay the greatest price here, as they will fall the furthest behind, and have the fewest resources available to ‘catch up’ once the pandemic threat has passed,” says Armitage.
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