Good going to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for mandating that all health care workers statewide, including staff at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, with limited medical and religious exceptions. Though the shot is not absolute protection against the highly transmissible delta variant, it all but guarantees symptoms will be light and the course of illness will be short. Paired with masks, that’s the surest way to keep people from getting very sick and stop vulnerable New Yorkers, including cancer patients and others with compromised immune systems, from contracting COVID-19.
As has been the case ever since this nasty bug entered the American bloodstream, public policy must be informed by emerging evidence. Early on, we thought the pathogen might travel on surfaces; that turned out incorrect. Masks, at first considered unhelpful, have since proven many times over to be lifesavers. Live and learn, learn and live.
The current moment demands a deep dive into the disease’s delta variant. We know that it infects people much more easily than its predecessor strains. We know that vaccines remain highly protective against hospitalization and death.
And we know that, because delta travels so much more easily, and because the vaccines haven’t even won emergency federal approval for kids under 12, many more children are testing positive, and getting sick. Though they remain far less likely than unvaccinated adults to get seriously ill, the sheer number of infections are resulting in much higher numbers of child hospitalizations.
Just as New York City gave the nation an early warning on COVID-19 carnage last year, ICUs full of sick kids in Arkansas, Louisiana and elsewhere could be a harbinger of what could befall kids here. This means masks in crowded city classrooms are an absolute imperative. Kids 12 and up should be required to get their shots before re-enrolling. And an earlier insistence that there will be no remote public schooling option for fall 2020, which we backed, needs to be revisited. In-person schooling is superior, but kids’ health comes first.
