For children, Covid fears and anxieties are spreading as quickly as the virus itself
With children now seemingly in the front line of the pandemic, there’s even more reason to be concerned about the damage we can’t see, writes Madonna King
“Will I ever see Grandma again?’’ Louis, aged 5, asked.
“If I touch the swing, will I get the disease?’’ Melanie, 7, asked
Isla is 10, and her question is heartbreaking: “When my family get sick will they ever get better?’’ Notice it’s a ‘when’ not an ‘if’.
“I’ve got no friends because I don’t have TikTok and all my friends have phones.’’ That’s delivered as a comment, not a question, from Sasha, 12.
“Someone died in Sydney and they were a kid – so soon kids here will start dying.’’ Ruby, 14, said yesterday.
“Why bother? My exams will be cancelled anyway and I can’t even go to my formal. My final year at school is already over, so why try?’’ And Alison is in year 12.
Six comments, from six children, showing the short-term and the long-term legacy left by a pandemic that will colour their lives forever.
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But they hide something else unfolding, that is perhaps as sinister as the scary number of children now contracting the virus.
Ask a psychologist and hear how they’ve never seen levels of teen anxiety like this. Never. And our political response, here, is to boost some rebates – with the consequence of lengthening the waiting queues!
Ask some mothers, who have seen their sports-mad children go from loving life to becoming withdrawn. “We asked if she wanted to talk to a friend,’’ one mother said of her daughter. “But she said she had nothing to say.’’
Before this latest lockdown, many children were scared. If you can’t even spell the words coronavirus or quarantine at the age of seven, how can you possibly understand it?
“It’s on everything. On Buzzfeed and online and on the radio when Mum takes us to school. It’s always the first thing on the news – and that’s where they put the worst things that can happen.’’ And that 16-year-old is spot on.
But now, most of those new cases in Queensland, are children. In fact 43 are aged under 20.
And more than 20 are under nine. These are tiny boys and girls who can’t possibly understand what symptomatic or asymptomatic might mean, and how relevant it is to them.
The death of a young man in Sydney, who was only a few years out of his teens, should focus all of our attention.
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If we don’t see the vaccine as relevant to ourselves, perhaps we might protect the child three doors up?
But then again, if we can’t work out how to vaccinate adults, one of my colleagues asked yesterday, how the hell will we vaccinate our children?
Try to get a vaccine for a healthy child. They are not even eligible. Try to get the Pfizer vaccine for an adult up to 40, and unless you fit into a small class of people, you have Buckleys.
We certainly can stay at home. We can wear masks. We can defer our trips to Bunnings and Cotton On and a dozen other places. We can also jail those with limelight deprivation who repeatedly put our law enforcement officers at risk.
But perhaps the most powerful motivator is the vision of dozens and dozens of children, lying in isolation – in a hospital bed or in their room at home – in two Australian cities.
Imagine if that was your own child. Scared and bewildered. Imagine if that was you, as a parent, watching it – and knowing that the young person who died yesterday wasn’t classified as sufficiently ill to be hospitalised.
Children now have to be front and centre of this fight – those who are sick, and those who are well but caught up in a messy and uncertain lockdown.
We can hug our own children too, and tell them that we, adults, are working like hell to stop this; to keep them safe. And we can role model it perhaps – by demanding greater focus on vaccines, by wearing masks and staying at home.
We can keep our little ones away from the news, and explain to our older children that they can be defined, later, by how they deal with this now. And that we have them covered.
We can think of their teachers too, who must be steeling themselves to go back into the classroom on Monday.
Can we really ask them to do that, without first offering them a vaccine?
Will another week of missed school flip the trajectory on where our children might be in a decade?
Or will it add to the washing machine of gossip they are now sharing online, between classes? Find a teen girl who can hold out hugging a friend for a whole school day, and I’ll drink a lime milkshake, standing on my head, in Queen Street Mall.
No-one should die of this monstrous disease in Australia. No one. Not adults. Not teachers. And certainly not children.
