Covid and kids: what’s the strategy here?

How unbearable to think our kids’ lives might be worse off than our own.

Once upon a time our nation proudly lived with zero community transmission of Covid, and the prime minister and premiers and chief ministers felt it was a good thing indeed. As a nation, we were in step. Confident. Complacent. Perhaps a touch hubristic. But then came the NSW outbreak and the tragic consequences are playing out in hospitals as I type. Now the NSW government has changed the narrative. The rhetoric is stern. We must learn to live with Covid. All of us, the entire nation.

But what of the children? Medical experts say children are at very low risk of getting serious disease but it has become a drumbeat of anxiety through parent groups I speak to. What happens when we let our youngest loose, unvaccinated, when only 70 to 80 per cent of adults are vaccinated? What protection will we be giving them? People are frightened, and fierce with love for their offspring. Children get Covid. Mark Duncan-Smith, the WA president of the Australian Medical Association, said the idea of opening the nation up too early, when only 80 per cent of the adults are vaccinated, is neglecting our children and borders on “child abuse”.

Children aged between 12 and 15 will be eligible to book a Pfizer vaccine from September 13 and ATAGI has advised that the severity of Covid-19 is less in adolescents compared with adults. But what of those teens who are hesitant to have the vaccine? Can parents force them to be vaccinated? What of long Covid with our young?

Getting the nation’s kids vaccinated will not be an easy task. I can feel the rumblings of disquiet around me already. Yet there’s growing evidence of a mental health pandemic among our kids from the lockdowns. Dr Neil Coventry, Victoria’s chief psychiatrist, says hospitals are dealing with “a significant increase in the number and severity of young people self-harming”. In NSW, according to news reports, emergency department visits for self-harm and suicidal ideation are up 31 per cent for children and teenagers compared with last year.

Mark McGowan. Picture: Jackson Flindell / The West Australian

It grieves me that some politicians abandoned the Covid elimination strategy so early, and are dragging the rest of the nation along with them – when it was their failings in the first place that got us into this mess. I’m with WA premier Mark McGowan on this: “West Aussies want decisions that consider the circumstances of all states and territories, not just Sydney.” Australia’s Covid-free strategy worked for a time. It was a singular freedom.

How unbearable to think our kids’ lives might be worse off than our own. The curve is meant to be upward, into greater prosperity, longevity and certainty. To think that we may not be giving them a better life than ours, well, it goes against the grain of good parenting. Our purpose as keeper and protector.

It feels like this decree for “living with Covid” has been taken out of our hands. There are those of us who do not want to join the countries overseas who’ve rushed to open before the population is fully vaxxed. We’ve seen the climbing death rates, overcrowded hospital wards and increasing rates of kids getting ill. We’re told here that even when we reach the 70 or 80 per cent targets there will still be restrictions depending on how much virus is in the community – masks, social distancing, QR codes and a return to localised lockdown in severe outbreaks. Perhaps this will help to protect our youngest.

But I still grieve the abandonment of the principle of Covid zero; there are still many who want it. I was proud of Australia as we moved away from individualistic psychology; the communal line held, for so long. And now I hazard a guess that many of us in lockdown dream of going back again to that wondrous normality of the zero-Covid existence, but we’re being railroaded into something else. I fear for our hospitals, our health workers, and our children most of all.