Dáil air is filtered while our children continue to get sick at school
The proportion of children chronically absent from school has doubled since we removed airborne protections and pretended the pandemic was over. Picture: Larry Cummins
10 March 2020, a sign on a local business door read: “Closed, covid-19 outbreak”. An occupant was removed on a stretcher by paramedics in hazmat suits. Close contacts, some of whom had kids in local schools, had not been contact traced. Villagers were panicking. I called my regional public health hub and asked “What’s the plan for schools?”
Official: No evidence of an outbreak. No plan needed.
Me: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
GPs weren’t allowed to test. Conveniently for a government keen to proceed with St Patrick’s Day shindigs, no community testing meant no evidence of community transmission.
Except, the sign and hazmat suits scuppered that narrative. “If the children of close contacts are in school, shouldn’t you be invoking the precautionary principle? Notifying schools and parents?” I enquired.
Two days later, schools nationally were closed, yet 15,000 racegoers headed to Cheltenham. By late March, the country was in lockdown. By April, my friend had died of Sars-Cov-2.
Five years on, while the WHO declared the emergency phase over, the pandemic is ongoing and there’s still no plan for schools.
In August 2020, I presented evidence to then education minister Norma Foley of covid outbreaks increasing with school reopenings globally, and that airborne spread was known.
What’s the plan to improve classroom ventilation before opening schools? I asked. No reply.
School closures and lockdowns could have been avoided in 2021, had the government heeded the science and aborted the catastrophic “meaningful Christmas”. Pubs opened; schools closed.
In 2022, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) cited illness as the most common reason for prolonged school absence.
Instead of addressing this, the report dismissed it on the grounds schools can’t control sickness. This arguably allowed governments to abdicate responsibility and blame lockdowns. Unsurprisingly, school absence is now soaring.
Education minister Helen McEntee’s recent statement about reversing the trend underscored the problem.
She said: ”Despite a return to normality, the proportion of children chronically absent from school has doubled post-covid.”
In reality, the proportion of children chronically absent from school has doubled since we removed airborne protections and pretended the pandemic was over.
The WHO recently cautioned: “We cannot talk about covid in the past tense. It’s still causing acute disease, long-covid and still kills”.
Headaches, nausea, abdominal pain, fevers, muscle and joint pain are the symptoms she lives with. There’s no cure, reinfections increase risk of additional disability and there are no paediatric long-covid clinics in Ireland. What’s the plan for sick kids like Lara to attend school safely?
I’ve documented numerous studies showing Sars2 harms children, including the publication showing the long-lasting burdens of long-covid.
The most expansive study found 20% of children have long-covid. Official statistics in England and Scotland show the number of children with long-covid almost doubled in a year (between March 2023 and March 2024).
Another study showed children and teens with suspected or diagnosed covid-19 experienced new or worsened psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety.
Authors cautioned against considering “only the consequences of the pandemic [ie lockdowns], without considering the impacts of the illness and the virus on the brain”.
Dr Pantea Javidan, a Stanford University human rights researcher, has outlined ways children’s rights to life, health and safety during the pandemic are falsely rendered oppositional to education and development.
Including minimising harms, creating moral panic around mental health and educational attainment. The Pisa study showed no clear difference in performance between countries with limited school closures and those with the longest.
Numerous studies show even “mild” Sars2 infections can cause immune dysregulation. The 2022 US paediatric RSV surge was attributed to “the large accumulation of covid-19-infected children and the potential long-term adverse effects of covid on the immune system”.
This February saw the worst hospital overcrowding on record. Previously well patients with no risk factors were reportedly admitted, acutely ill from flu, taking weeks to recover.
If there’s more sickness now than “during the pandemic”, maybe we should acknowledge we’re still during the pandemic and implement public health measures to reduce sickness. How?
RSV, flu and Sars2 are all airborne, they hang in the air like invisible smoke. As previously outlined in the , indoor air quality legislation requires all classrooms and workplaces to ensure CO2 levels of under 1,000pm.
Teachers are amongst the worst hit by long-covid, and clean air also reduces staff sickness.
A study in Finland found air purifiers in day cares reduced children’s illnesses by 30%. Italy’s Marche region installed mechanical ventilation, reducing school covid infections by 82%. The WHO produced an “indoor airborne risk assessment in the context of SARS-CoV-2” tool to “reduce the unacceptable and unnecessary health burden resulting from the airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens”.
The Dáil’s ventilation system was adapted in 2021, but our children continue to breathe contaminated classroom air. We can either pray to St Jude (patron saint of lost causes) as our kids’ health is pummelled by repeated infections, or, we can demand Dáil standard, legally compliant, classroom air. Teachers and parents: Tá an t-am anois.
