It’s the biggest pandemic era question facing many parents of young children: When will it be safe for kids to go back to daycare? For the economy to reopen—for people to be able to go back to work at all—the child care issue has to be addressed, and in a way that won’t further the spread of COVID-19.
“As people are going back to work, they need options for childcare,” says Jill Weatherhead, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.
What will it take to safely reopen daycares? As any parent will tell you, kids don’t do physical distancing well, while toddlers also have a habit of putting anything and everything in their mouths. So how might these facilities open up, and what would that look like?
As with everything pandemic-related, there still aren’t a lot of clear answers, but these are some of the preventive measures that would need to be in place in order to safely send your kids back to daycare.
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CDC guidelines for daycare centers
Some daycares have remained open even during lockdown orders, albeit at reduced capacity and with a number of preventive measures in place, in order to serve the children of essential workers. As these daycares have continued to operate, the CDC has issued guidelines on necessary preventive measures.
“These stringent requirements [are] critical for preventing spread,” Weatherhead says.
CDC guidelines include having one dedicated teacher for a single classroom, no mingling of children between classrooms, practicing frequent hand-washing and disinfection measures, taking temperature checks at the door and not allowing parents into the daycare facility but instead having them hand off their children at the door.
These measures have been in place at some facilities these past few months. What this will look like for a specific daycare will vary depending on their individual circumstances, but preventive measures will be critical moving forward.
Daycare facilities also need to have plans in place for how to handle staffing shortages, as well as the event a staff member or child gets sick with COVID-19.
“The key is a lot of testing and a lot of contact tracing,” says Michael Chang, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at UTHealth’s McGovern Medical School. Extensive testing and contact tracing are critical to reducing the spread, and this will be especially true for daycares.
“Daycares need to communicate with their staff and parents as to what is going on,” Weatherhead says. “That communication is going to be critical.”
Safety requires participation of everyone in the community
As Weatherhead points out, keeping everyone safe requires the participation of everyone, including parents. Daycares will need to implement stringent guidelines, while families will have to be proactive about making sure no one in the family is sick. If anyone within the household starts developing symptoms, they will need to keep their kids home.
Similarly, if anyone within the daycare community starts showing symptoms, parents will need to be notified and extra preventive measures will need to be enacted, which could include temporary closures.
“This is where participation of everyone within the community is required,” Weatherhead says.
Although there’s been a lot of talk about antibody testing and what that might suggest about immunity, there’s still a lot we don’t know yet about how accurate these tests are and how long-lasting any conferred immunity might be. Chang cautions that antibody testing might not be as helpful as people are hoping.
“Just because you have antibodies doesn’t necessarily mean you are immune from reinfection,” Chang says.
Kids don’t seem to spread COVID-19 as much
As many parents will tell you, kids are known to bring home just about every disease imaginable. Children in day care get sick with an estimated 6-8 upper respiratory infections and 1-2 episodes of vomiting and/or diarrhea a year. (That said, the silver lining is that by the time children start kindergarten, they get sick much less frequently than their classmates who weren’t in daycare; it all comes down to when your kid will get sick a lot, rather than if your kid will get sick a lot.) In turn, kids tend to get their parents sick with whatever they are bringing home.
For some reason, COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be acting this way. Not only are kids not as affected by COVID-19, they also don’t seem to be playing as big of a role in spreading the virus.
“It seems like adults are infecting kids, rather than kids infecting adults,” Chang says.
If this continues to hold true—which is no guarantee, given our constantly shifting understanding of this very new virus—when it comes to prioritizing what should be opened and when, it might make sense to open some schools and day cares earlier, rather than later.
“If you are going to argue for all of the things you are going to open, based on the data, you could make an argument that kids could be in school,” Chang says.
We need a plan for opening without a vaccine
One more thing? We might need to open up schools and daycares before we have a vaccine. Although the estimated timeline to develop one is 12 to 18 months, there is no guarantee we will have one in that time frame, if at all, and that’s not even taking into account the logistics of getting everyone vaccinated.
“Having a vaccine would be great, but you would probably have to plan for opening without one,” Chang says. Without a vaccine, we’d need to rely a lot more on measures such as the CDC guidelines for daycares as well as widespread testing and contact tracing.
As with everything pandemic-related, right now the only thing we can say with certainty is that there aren’t a whole lot of good answers. There is only the hope that, as time goes on, we can contain the spread enough—and institute enough protective measures—that daycares can operate safely.
