On June 21st Urgency of Normal's group of doctors & scientists sent a letter to the CDC & the White House urging a revision to current COVID-19 guidelines for children, in particular to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations. The group implores our regulatory agencies to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good.
To support parents, students, teachers, and administrators in understanding the whole-person status of our children’s health, a group of leading scientists and doctors has released an advocacy toolkit entitled “Children, COVID and the Urgency of Normal,”.
The toolkit presents clear, understandable data on vaccine efficacy with Omicron, the dire state of student mental health, and how to protect the vulnerable while also urgently restoring normalcy to our children’s lives.
Head of ICU Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng talks about his courageous advocacy to restore normalcy for kids. Dr. Kyeremanteng, a well-respected physician who approaches care with data and compassion, shares the challenges of speaking out during an era of "Cancel Culture."
What we want to do with this toolkit is to empower people with information that can draw us closer together with shared understanding, and find paths forward that will be beneficial.
The goal of this toolkit is to put data in one place in a form that is understandable by just about everyone. Throughout the pandemic there have been disagreeing expert voices and we acknowledge that. Our goal here as experts is not just to tell you what's true, but to empower you to understand it and take it back to your community.
Our goal, as physicians and scientists, with humility and compassion, is to arm you with the tools that you need to help your kids thrive mentally and physically, to meet their broad human needs.
Vulnerability means a lot of different things... For my teenage patients their vulnerability to Covid is low. Their vulnerability is risk for-substance use, anxiety & social isolation, car accidents.
The goal of this group is to humbly recognize the diversity of vulnerabilities that we all have as human beings, to bring our clinical experience and the fact that we have had our fingers on the pulse of the data. We aim to help you understand the framework we are using to make decisions and to give you the information to make your own decisions.
Dr. Høeg talks about her research tracking case rates at two paired school districts in the same community, each with 12,000 students - one with a mask mandate and another with mask optional. She explains that Covid-19 rates at both districts have remained comparable and both rose during the Omicron surge. Recently the mask mandate district went mask-optional, with transmission actually falling. Over the course of the fall mask mandates didn't reduce transmission rates in the mask-mandated district.
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