Last updated on March 4th, 2021 at 11:32 am
On Friday, Peel Health issued severe Covid-19 guidelines geared at parents of children attending school or daycare. It wasn’t long until health experts entered the fray, roundly condemning quarantine policies that would do great psychological harm to children. By Monday, Peel Health walked it back by issuing a tepid “oops, sorry” on Twitter; providing further evidence that the “cures” being applied to Covid-19 are so much worse than the “disease”.
Peel Region is part of the Greater Toronto Area and has a population of close to 1.4 million. It is also home to the largest and busiest airport in Canada, Pearson International Airport, which has also been in the headlines recently with returning travellers outrightly refusing Covid tests and ignoring quarantine rules put in place by Justin Trudeau’s Federal Liberal Government.
On Friday, Peel Region schools distributed a handout calling for the isolating of young children in their own home. If that wasn’t enough, the harsh restrictions were to be applied to children who do not even have symptoms. Those children were to “self-isolate”; meaning they must stay in a separate room, eat in a separate room, and even use a separate bathroom. And if the child must leave a room, it is mandatory that they wear a mask and stay 2 metres apart from other family members. As well, any other children in the home must be kept separate from their siblings during what amounts to a 14-day forced quarantine.
Needless to say, health experts chimed in on this government-mandated madness.
According to Dr. Susan Richardson, Head of the Division of Microbiology at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, “this is cruel punishment for a child, especially for younger children, 4-10 years old.” She went on to state, “Shutting a child off from their parents and siblings for up to 14 days in this manner could produce significant and long-lasting emotional and psychological effects.”
Dr. Tess Clifford, director of the Psychology Clinic at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, questioned the practicality of the measures. More importantly, she too expressed concern for the health and welfare of innocent – and healthy – children, stating the policies were “highly likely to cause harm to children who would already be experiencing considerable distress with having to remain at home,”
Dr. Martha Fulford, an infectious diseases physician at Hamilton Health Science who focuses on pediatrics, called the measures “shocking… especially when you consider this is being proposed for children who are not in any way sick.”
Days after the release of the draconian Covid-19 quarantine guidelines, Peel Health posted a Twitter thread, calling it “a mistake”.
The “sorry, we’ll get it right” math simply does not add up, especially in light of a $5000-per-day fine that was attached to the mandate.
The regional seat of Peel is in Brampton, where mayor Patrick Brown also took to social media to back up the “mea culpa”.
The Brown tweet is mystifying on so many levels. First off, the mayor calls the Covid-19 measures “recommendations”, but a $5000 non-compliance fine makes them anything but. He then states the decisions must be based on “science with evidence for all to see”. The fact of the matter is science and evidence are grossly missing from the landscape. What is clear, however, is that children do not pose as a threat. According to Dr. Richardson, “An asymptomatic child in a classroom with one child testing positive is at very low risk for acquiring infection. Most importantly, we are losing sight of the fact that if he/she should contract COVID while quarantining at home, they and their siblings are at an extremely low risk of suffering severe disease as a consequence.” Brown also lauds Dr. Lawrence Loh, Peel’s Medical Officer of Health, for fixing the “mistake”. Yet, this is the same Dr. Loh – among many Provincial Health Officers pushing school closures – who was called out by more than 100 pediatricians across Canada in an open letter demanding that provincial governments re-open schools and keep them open.
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