If you are a CA medical professional and would like to sign onto this letter, please click here: https://forms.gle/4Mxc3q84ZiqRUveh8 and complete by Friday November 5.
Dear Governor Newsom, Dr. Aragón, Dr. Ghaly, Dr. Pan and Dr. Sud:
It appears likely that later this week, children ages 5-11 will be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. While this is welcome news, it also comes with the news that California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has no plans to allow for students to remove their masks in K-12 schools. We believe it is imperative that you introduce “off-ramps” for mitigation measures, particularly with respect to masking, quarantines, and asymptomatic testing. We urge you to base your decisions on child-centered public health objectives. Please do not allow students’ third disrupted year of public education to remain compromised for longer than is justified by reasonable metrics.
We are fortunate that across most of California, our vaccination rates have exceeded 70% for one dose—and are approaching 85-90% in some Bay Area counties. Additionally, we saw no surge of cases associated with school reopening in August. We are hopeful that adult vaccine mandates will continue to push down our most important metric, hospitalization rates, and protect against future variants.
Despite achieving some of the lowest Covid rates in the nation, California’s children continue to endure greater in-school restrictions than most states. Restrictions like mandatory outdoor masking would be unacceptable to most adults. Children and their families see no end in sight to restrictions, as there are currently no guideposts to indicate when they will be loosened or retired.
Adults in eight of the nine Bay Area counties, who currently have the strictest masking restrictions, will be able to remove their masks indoors eight weeks after the emergency use authorization of the vaccine for children 5-11 (if not sooner like in Marin county as of Nov 1). We are urging you to do the same for K-12 schools, which have been proven to be even safer in terms of COVID-19 spread than the surrounding communities.
Widespread frustration linked to an absence of off-ramps for school masking and quarantines undermines our most important public health objective, which is increased vaccine uptake. Without clear benefits from vaccination, such as attending school unmasked, many parents of elementary school children will feel ambivalent about vaccination and may postpone vaccinating their child until fully mandated several months from now.
We all remember what it felt like last year when our state was ranked dead last in the country in terms of the percentage of schools reopened and we don't want to see our six million public school kids be left behind again when it comes to returning their schools and lives fully back to normal. We must re-focus our attention on high quality educational experiences for children, where they are allowed to see each other's faces and return to full linguistic and emotional engagement.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jeanne Noble
Director of COVID Response,
UCSF Emergency Department
CA Parent Power Advisory Board Member
Dr. Monica Gandhi
Director, UCSF Center for AIDS Research
CA Parent Power Advisor
If you are a CA medical professional and would like to sign onto this letter, please click here: https://forms.gle/4Mxc3q84ZiqRUveh8 and complete by Friday November 5.