Politicians Bristle as Terrified Parents, Hospitalized Children, a Quarantine Quagmire and a Federal Investigation Hijack the New School Year
Forgive parents of young children for not fully relaxing on Labor Day. Instead, many were buried by a cascade of COVID headlines as they thumbed through their phones, confirming their darkest fears. The delta variant was raging like wildfire, infecting kids at a frightening rate, sending more and more to the hospital, and hijacking the hope typically affiliated with the dawn of a new school year.
Regardless of one’s political views about the pandemic, the numbers were starting to scream off the screen:
More than 1,000 schools in 35 states have been forced to close.
More people were hospitalized this Labor Day than last — and positive cases had mushroomed 300 percent compared to a year earlier.
Children now make up more than a quarter (26.8 percent) of weekly COVID-19 cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Grim holiday weekend reports include 27 new COVID deaths in Utah along with 4,657 new cases — 1,151 being school-aged children.
And the combination of MIS-C, RSV and COVID respiratory cases now average 209 per week, pushing Primary Children’s Hospital at or near full capacity since late August.
“My son brought Covid home from school. Both of my children are too young to be vaccinated,” Paradise father Justin Jasperson wrote on a Twitter thread to Governor Spencer Cox. “I’m so disheartened by certain members of the legislature who are minimizing the infection and deaths of our fellow Utahns, it is callous and disgusting…If we lose ONE MORE CHILD, the blood is on their hands,” Jasperson continued. “Make the difficult choices and spend some political capital. Be the leader you were elected to be, please?”
For his part, Cox told reporters it is well documented how much he hates masks. And the governor also said there is “no way” the legislature would ever approve a mask mandate for the state.
“The mask thing is so, so, so blown out of proportion,” Cox said. “Masks are not as effective as most of the pro-mask crowd are arguing, we know that. They’re just not.”
State lawmakers have banned mask mandates though the debate continues to percolate and polarize, especially in schools. Salt Lake City and Grand County have bucked Utah’s Capitol Hill, finding loopholes to issue mask mandates.
Earlier this month, a teenage girl in Salt Lake County became Utah’s second youth COVID-19 death.
Still, over the past 18 months, since Rudy Gobert’s positive diagnosis effectively delivered the pandemic stateside, there’s been a disconnect between children testing positive and actually landing in an Intensive Care Unit. It rarely happened under the alpha and subsequent variants of COVID-19.
So, the question for most is how different and dangerous is the delta variant? Would masks in schools really prevent the spread? Is there a quarantine protocol? And if my unvaccinated child tests positive, will they show symptoms? Will they bounce back in a day or two? Or, God forbid, will they end up on a ventilator in the ICU?
Exasperated Doctors and Ominous Modeling
When Marc Harrison, the President & CEO of Intermountain Healthcare took the podium at the governor’s recent press conference, he glowered at the group of maskless faces in attendance, announcing he usually avoided crowds like that since he has cancer in remission and is immunocompromised.
“I hope that all of you who aren’t wearing masks aren’t carrying the delta variant because if you are, you could kill me,” he said. “This is serious stuff.”
And with that, the tone was set for the gloomy medical reports that followed. For the doctors, the gloves were off.
In the Intermountain system alone, ICUs are at 103 percent capacity, Harrison reported. There have been more life-flight transfers over the past month than ever before. And 40 percent of ICU beds are filled by COVID patients — compromising the care for everyone with a non-COVID illness.
“It’s vanishingly rare for vaccinated people to end up on a ventilator…and they virtually never die,” Harrison added. “That is not true for the unvaccinated.”
Dr. Chris Miller from Primary Children’s Hospital said they had zero COVID patients in May but watched the number unspool as the school year started.
“We are now treating between 12 to 17 children on any given day in one of our hospitals with five to seven of those children being in ICUs,” Miller said. Between 31 and 52 children were treated for COVID across Primary’s system during the first week of September, he added.
“Our caregivers find themselves in an unnerving situation as we expect the numbers to continue to go up with limited capacity to care for those children.”
State-level data modeling confirms the doctors’ dire predictions. During the month of August in 2020, Utah had just under 1,000 cases of COVID statewide among children ages one to 14. Spin the calendar to August 2021 and that number has ballooned to 6,000 cases, according to Erin Clouse, Strategic Engagement Manager in health sciences at University of Utah Health.
“Looking forward, by the end of September, it wouldn’t be unheard of to see 1,000 kids 1 to 14 each day Covid positive,” explained Clouse, whose delta variant modeling for the University of Utah starts to feel like fodder for a science fiction horror movie.
To put it in perspective, just before Labor Day, Utah logged 40 children between the ages of five and 17 in the hospital with COVID-19. The number of kids in the hospital for COVID during the entirety of 2020? Just 19, according to Clouse.
Since kids under the age of five aren’t included in the current numbers, the total amount of kids suffering in the hospital from COVID is even higher, Clouse noted.
“It’s just getting bigger and bigger each day and it’s not good,” she said. “The virus doesn’t care what you believe about masks. It just wants the next person, whether that next person is a school-age child or an 80-year-old, it just doesn’t care.”
Mask Politics, Public Spats & Lawsuit Threats
In Utah’s most populous county, it didn’t matter whether you were unmasked or not to sense the fate of last month’s short-lived mask mandate. In a party-line vote, the Republican-led Salt Lake County Council quickly moved to overturn the mandate — but may have perpetuated the parental debate.
“I feel terrified to send my kids to school,” mother Jenny Nazzaro lamented after the 6-3 vote.
“Your choice of not masking is impacting the choice of somebody living or dying,” added Genevera Prothero, a parent and member of Keep Davis School District Safe.
Emotions following the county vote resembled scenes in cities and school districts across the country, where anti-mask and anti-vaccination protestors have swarmed public policy hearings.
Some Utah parents worry that kids electing to wear masks will be bullied by ones who are not. But Corinne Johnson with Utah Parents United, says the council vote protected parental choice.
“Every parent in the state of Utah can look at this as a precedent that we have a God-given right to parent our children and make these decisions for them,” she said. “It’s about choice. We support parents who want to have kids wear masks, they should have that right. I don’t want my kids to wear masks, and I should have that right.”
The debate is particularly heated since the delta surge comes just as families are returning their little ones to campuses across the country. But since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention elected to increase the size of its trials, a vaccine for children under 12 has been delayed and is now not likely to be available until early 2022. At one point, health officials projected the vaccine for children under 12 could be on the market by the end of September.
Meantime, between August 15-30, 2,000 Utah children ages five to 11 tested positive. Last year, during the same two-week period, there were only 240 positive cases.
As of early September, schools in 19 states have sent 90,000 students to quarantine, while many shut down just days or weeks into the year. Grand County High School just closed due to an outbreak among both students and teachers.
The volatility has parents on edge. Unlike the first stages of the pandemic, many have returned to work. And if their children are forced to quarantine following a positive COVID test, childcare would be much more costly now compared to when at least one parent worked from home.
If parents are dazed and confused, healthcare workers are vexed and bemused. Free vaccines were supposed to have curbed COVID by spring or summer. Instead, numbers have boomeranged, just in time for flu season.
“It’s a difficult time for clinical teams who are working really hard 24-7,” said Kathy Wilets, director of media relations for University of Utah Health. “We believe at the beginning of the pandemic, people delayed healthcare and we are starting to see some of the consequences of that now. Our hospitals are full and our doctors and staff are doing everything in their power to meet demand.”
St. George Hospital is one example. The nursing staff is understaffed by 12 nurses. And due to the COVID surge — the ICU capacity is at 144 percent — the hospital has shifted from “conventional care” to “contingency care.”
In Idaho, hospitals are so overwhelmed by unvaccinated patients with COVID that they are rationing care. By enacting their so-called “Crisis Standards of Care,” doctors will be forced to deny ICU beds to unvaccinated people with COVID in favor of other patients.
“People will die because of this,” Dena Grayson, an Idaho doctor and Ph.D. tweeted in response.
The mounting pressure is starting to play out in major ways. A Texas school closed after two teachers died of COVID. The Los Angeles teacher union has called for a mask mandate and vaccination mandate for eligible students. And the governor of Minnesota has been sued by parents alleging his lack of a mask mandate is a civil rights violation for students with disabilities.
On that note, Utah is not immune. The U.S. Department of Education has filed a civil rights investigation against the Beehive State (along with four others) for its ban on mask mandates. The governor and GOP leadership argue the investigation is unwarranted, pointing to mask mandates enacted at local levels. When asked about the federal investigation, the Utah lawmaker who sponsored the bill that banned state mask mandates didn’t mince words.
“I don’t even care about it,” said Rep. Paul Ray (R-Clearfield). “Hell, it’s a waste of time.”
How Choices Have Consequences: A Way Forward?
Research just published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Report found that hospitalizations and emergency room visits for kids with COVID increased from June to August
Hospitalization rates increased five-fold among children and teens.
The rate of hospitalization for unvaccinated teens was 10 times higher than for those that were vaccinated. Hospitalizations were highest among kids aged up to four and teens 12-17. And one in four children who were hospitalized needed intensive care.
Even more alarming, a CDC simulation found that without masking or testing, at the current trajectory of the delta variant, 75 percent of kids 12 and under nationwide will be infected within three months.
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has been quick to point out healthcare official’s dire statistics and “potentially devastating information.”
“It’s very clear there is little appetite for any kind of statewide (mask) mandates,” she told reporters. “It’s incredibly frustrating for us.”
Instead, the Cox/Henderson administration delivered 1.2 million masks to schools, which are available to any child. And, in a response to the delta surge, Henderson explained that when schools reach a 2 percent infection rate, the “Test to Stay” state law will kick in, requiring students to show a negative COVID test result to remain in the building.
“Choices have consequences,” Henderson said. “If a parent chooses not to let their child be tested for COVID-19, if that two percent threshold has been met in their school, that parent is also choosing remote learning for their child.”
During his press conference, Cox also expressed a sense of urgency. “Things have changed. This variant is very virulent. It’s very contagious,” Cox said. “And, of course, we’re seeing these mass hospitalizations.”
But the governor has been as spastic in his COVID responses as the spray from a second grader’s sneeze.
He recently sharpened his tone about the possibility of masks coming back. “I’ve got to be honest with you…I’m really tired. I’m really done with it,” Cox said. “And I’m not too excited to have to sacrifice to protect someone who doesn’t seem to care.”
The governor followed that with a mask remark that made national headlines last week. “The anti-maskers and the extreme maskers all, we just need to get over ourselves a little bit and try to have a little bit of common sense here. Unfortunately, that’s what’s missing from all of this discussion.”
Cox has since attempted to walk back the “extreme maskers” comment.
Cox says masks will neither solve the delta variant problem nor are they the evil that some have portrayed them to be. He called them “a tool” with some impact, “probably not nearly as much as some people think.”
The state is about to find out, Cox said, noting that Grand County and Salt Lake City has a mask mandate in the midst of the delta surge. So far, no other Utah schools have been forced to close. But Utah parents are likely checking the online school case counts well before they flip through Instagram or Amazon.
Back home with her math equations and projections, Erin Clouse, with University of Utah Health, knows the numbers in her modeling are just that. They are hard figures, immune from politics, partisans or opinions.
“This school year, something is different,” Clouse warns. “We have six times the number of sick kids than this time last year, so something changed. We should expect a very tough winter.”
