Open Letter Nov 22, 2022 - OCDSB Trustees - Reject Mask Mandates
woke school trustee want to impose masks on 72,000 students - not backed by health authorities - but driven by ego
Dear OCDSB Board of Trustees;
Re: Emergency Order to Impose Mask Mandates
By now with public backlash, I’m sure that some of you are questioning the reasonableness of entertaining mask mandates for the 72,000 students you are responsible for and the potential for getting off on the wrong foot with the tens of thousands of parents in Ottawa who will resent and resist a mandate.
Since I ran for trustee and have been speaking with parents for many months, parents in Zone 6 (and across the city) are reaching out and telling me they are fed up and are removing their children from OCDSB schools for private schools, learning pods or in favor of a school board that won't mask their kids based on opinions of non-qualified bureaucrats.
The overt biases and premeditated plan of the chair and of Trustee Kaplan-Myrth to impose mandates on children are plainly obvious. In August Trustee Evans attempted to call an emergency meeting of the board to mandate masks for back to school. There were no public health officials advocating for this at the time and there were no public restrictions of any kind at that time. Evans attempted to claim that the Montfort Hospital was overwhelmed and therefore students needed to be masked - there was no appetite from the previous board for such a meeting.
Dr. Kaplan-Myrth, then candidate for OCDSB, employed divisive rhetoric and cast vile moral aspersions against people who disagreed with her and held contrary opinion about masks including against Premiere Ford. She responded to Ford’s statement that, “We’re all getting back to normal folks” as “the language of far right, anti-vaxxers, ableists who,” (and implied sic) don’t care they’re killing elders and babies. (Nili Kaplan-Myrth Sept 6, 2022 – The Agenda - TVO)
Let me first state the obvious – the current push for mask mandates is not justifiable due to COVID. The argument is emerging because of RSV and the so-called Triple Threat of RSV, FLU and Covid & the confluence of a surge of RSV/Flu and our children’s hospital to handle that surge.
If it were justifiable, our federal, provincial, and municipal health authorities would be mandating it.
This is fundamentally about the opinions of two people who believe being school board trustees gives them authoritarian power to dictate behaviors of others based on their sole beliefs and on claims to power and expertise they do not possess.
What do we know about RSV?
According to a CBC article, “Why mask mandates may be harder to justify in solving the crisis in children's hospitals” Nov 19, 2022
RSV is being transmitted mainly in daycares and in young children and there we don't want to have mask mandates," said Dr. Caroline Quach-Thanh, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Montreal's Sainte-Justine children's hospital and the former chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI)
It is also noted that the primary hospitalizations for RSV infections (and flu) are children under age 4.
It is arguable that Covid Mask Mandates were justifiable at points when we knew little about the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of COVID, when there were no treatment protocols, when there was no vaccine and when we needed to flatten a curve. It is also arguable as the vaccine was rolling out, and as we were still dealing with lack of herd immunity and still facing the deadlier Alpha & Delta waves, that restrictions like masks still had reasonable grounds.
As I said, however, this is not about Covid 19.
There are no public health officials in Canada mandating masks. Recently Kieran Moore, Ontario’s Top Doctor, who the day prior had made a strong recommendation to Ontarians to wear masks in crowded settings was photographed at a crowded indoor event not wearing a mask.
This mandate is not to be left to the unscientific opinions of individuals at the school board level and the very idea the board is entertaining this mandate itself is a gross over-reach of its authority. You are not public health officials.
The bar to impose restrictive mask mandates on 72,000 children MUST be exceptionally high and MUST clearly demonstrate that the distributed cost to children, families and the community in learning outcomes, mental health impacts and challenges to socialization is outweighed by lives saved. There should be a clear, direct and significant correlation that masking 72,000 children will save many lives.
No such correlation can be argued.
What is the current risk and the problem the board is trying to solve?
It seems the following are at issue:
CHEO is overwhelmed.
Emergency Department is seeing record numbers of visits each day and waiting times are long.
They have doubled their PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) by adding 5 (FIVE) beds to deal with the RSV/Flu crisis to a total of 10 beds. If 10 beds are filled at CHEO with Triple Threat patients, and Ottawa has 1,000,000 people, the simple math is that 1 in 100,000 people in Ottawa are children with serious health conditions and are hospitalized due to this current surge in infections.
Trustee Kaplan-Myrth would call me ableist for saying masks for 72,000 students is a bridge too far, but the standard for ANY medical professional is to understand what triage is and what appropriate and commensurate response is to dealing threats to health.
What is the current cause of the surge at CHEO and what are the contributing factors?
Alex Munter, CEO at CHEO listed a twitter thread recently citing causes of current stress on the system.
Lack of beds (down to 150 from original 300)
Growing population of local children up 9x since hospital construction
Surge of Mental Health issues (Spike since covid is common knowledge – are masks, isolation and social depersonalization correlated?)
Provincial cuts to healthcare
Staffing pressures due to covid
Pre-pandemic, the children's health system was *already* too small. Too many kids waited too long *if* they could wait.
Aside from Munter’s elucidation of the multi-factor systemic problem causing the incapacity to handle the current surge, there are other significant causes:
There is a supply-chain issue with children’s over-the-counter medications across Canada for cold and flu. In order to manage symptoms, parents are relying on the medical system for access to medications and lack of medicines may well be adding to the seriousness of symptoms leading to emergency room visits.
Walk-In Clinics are no longer walk-in due to covid, and require appointments
Shortage of family doctors
Immune deficits due to covid. Children have not been exposed to seasonal viruses for almost three years. Very young children have never had exposure to RSV or the flu and so a reasonable claim is made that with an immunity deficit within a population a surge would be expected.
And what are the costs to children and the community at large?
Much has been covered in this area and there are far more arguments undermining mask mandates for kids than I can list. here are some:
Wearing masks depersonalizes and dehumanizes people.
Young children learning primary or second language, or who have auditory processing disabilities or language comprehension issues suffer from not being able to interpret communication effectively.
We know cloth masks are ineffective.
One could assume that if one N95 mask was used each day per child per day that every 15 days, one million masks would enter our landfills or contaminate our environment.
Then there are the serious questions of effectiveness – especially in children due to improper use and improper fitting; This is especially important since according to CBC articles, RSV is primarily spread by surface contacts and not by airborne droplets.
The serious question must be asked: What is the most significant contributor and the most significant solution to the current problem?
Is it ethical from a cost benefit analysis, for two activists (Evans and Kaplan-Myrth), who intended without any capacity of foreknowledge months ago to impose mask mandates, to use motivated reasoning to over-rule provincial health authorities and force masks on 72,000 children?
IS IT ETHICAL when those children are not even the primary victims of the current surge, and who we know are not at serious risk of negative outcomes due to Covid, RSV or the Flu?
This is a multi-factor problem and the case cannot be made that direct actions imposed on children in one of four school boards in Ottawa by activist board members can statistically have ANY measurable benefit.
People at risk, or connected to those at risk by close contacts, should wear masks to protect themselves. Schools should educate children and parents about risks and use information and rational persuasion to encourage mask use.
Mandates are unethical at this point, removing choice and autonomy of citizens in a democratic nation. They also infantilize members of the community under the assumption that mask nannies know best and that people are incapable of understanding their own physical and moral choices.
A case cannot be scientifically made that masking 7.2% of the population of Ottawa will impact the overwhelm of the local children’s hospital - especially when the primary vectors of RSV are children in daycares being infected by slobber and sharing toys.
I urge you to reject the motion to force masks on our children,
Shannon Boschy
Former Candidate OCDSB Trustee
Old Ottawa East – Zone 9 Resident