Stop Needlesly Quarantining The Children!

So it finally happened to me. After hearing all Chol Hamoed from people in the community about how schools were contacting parents to inform them that their kids needed to quarantine for interactions that had occurred days before, my wife & I received a phone call on Thursday evening from the nurse of one of the local Yeshivot we send our children to.

We were told that one of our children was found to have been in "contact" with someone who had tested positive for Covid a couple of days prior but whose symptoms had started sometime on Shabbat. However, this "contact" potentially happened within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms so they were requiring our child to quarantine for the next 7 days (14 days from the contact).

To protect the privacy of the person who tested positive, I will not share any of the details of this "contact" other than to say that it happened 7 1/2 days before we got this phone call, it was for less than the 15 minutes that the CDC requires for quarantine, my child showed ZERO symptoms since the contact and there were other mitigating factors.

When we pointed this out to the nurse and asked if it was the determination of the DOH (Department of Health) that my child needed to quarantine, she admitted that it was not and in fact they had never even notified the DOH, but that the school's medical committee - out of an abundance of caution - decided that a quarantine was appropriate.

This my friends is EXACTLY what I was referring to when I wrote in my initial OpEd that we are "being machmir at the expense of our children". My wife and I immediately called our physician and reviewed the facts of the case with him. Given that it was already over 7 days since the exposure, the exposure itself did not meet any of the CDC guidelines and my child showed absolutely no symptoms, our doctor said that there was a better chance of my child being hit by lightning over the next 24 hours (and it wasn't supposed to rain) than that he/she would pass Covid onto anyone from that interaction.

But then our doctor said something incredible, and when you think about it so obviously true. You should go tell that school the following: "Out of an abundance of caution for xxx's social and emotional well-being, I have determined that xxx must not quarantine".

My wife and I conveyed this to the school and not surprisingly, it fell on deaf ears. So there you have it folks. A faceless and nameless committee who isn't accountable to anyone ruined my child's entire Yom Tov for absolutely no reason. And the committees of all of these schools collectively did it to dozens of kids in our community and to hundreds of children over the past month.

This isn't going to stop until people speak up and demand change. Gershon Distenfeld can keep on writing but that alone won't change things. We are all being sheep here. We are letting fear rule over rational thinking. We should all be demanding that we, the parents, in consultation with our own physicians should be making these decisions, not some arbitrary set of doctors that have no connection to our families, no context in which to evaluate the particulars of a child's social and psychological well being and no accountability to anyone. 

But there's even a larger problem here. My child (and many others) had to sit home all Yom Tov instead of getting together with their friends as they had planned. But what about the majority of kids who were fortunate enough to have avoided the incidental Covid quarantine? They also were punished this year because of the insistence of our leadership to pursue "one size fits all" policies for our community that fail to appreciate the fact that this virus discriminates blatantly based on age. Our children didn't have a Simchas Torah this year. There were very few of them in Shul. It didn't have to be that way. If we don't reverse our mindset really soon, we will continue to harm the children, deprive them of experiences they deserve to have and even, potentially, drive them away from yiddishkeit.

Once again, history is not going to judge us kindly for what we are doing here. We are doing this to ourselves. The state is already requiring us to do more than is necessary. There isn't a single thing that our community is doing above state requirements that has proven to prevent the spread of the virus. Period. Let's stop with all the chumrahs. Let's get back to life as normal as much as possible, especially for the children. I know that's too big an ask given the polarization in the community and the extreme fear among some. But at the very least, can we stop quarantining the children for a risk that has a lower chance of happening than a person winning the lottery?