SILVER SPRING, Md. — This county of 1 million people right outside Washington just received new isolation rules, which are stricter on children under 5 than they are on older children and adults. This is despite massive evidence that children under 5 are safe from the virus and at less risk to spread the virus to others.
Children under age 5 who test positive or are otherwise suspected to have COVID will be forced to isolate at home for 10 days after symptom onset. Of course, 4-year-olds often have totally asymptomatic COVID, so the clock on the isolation period wouldn’t start ticking until the tot received a positive COVID test.
Older children and adults would only have to isolate for five days after symptom onset in keeping with federal and state guidelines.
Forcing COVID-positive 4-year-olds to isolate longer than COVID-positive adults is not a sensible public health policy. As one recent study put it, “Young children are more likely to have asymptomatic infections than older individuals and … asymptomatically infected individuals are less likely to transmit than individuals who have symptomatic infection.”
Children have smaller and less powerful lungs, thus they exhale smaller clouds of droplets that do not travel as far. That’s why you are safer around an infected 4-year-old than an infected 18-year-old.
Also, isolating young children mostly means keeping them away from other young children. Yet other young children are the safest from serious COVID infection, by far, with incredibly low death and hospitalization rates.
So why is Montgomery County ignoring state guidelines and being stricter on 4-year-olds than on adults?
“They’re neither vaccinated nor can they effectively wear face coverings,” explained county health official Earl Stoddard.
Little children being unvaccinated is totally irrelevant to isolation periods. We are already talking about people who have confirmed COVID. An unvaccinated COVID-positive 4-year-old is far less likely to infect you than a vaccinated COVID-positive 40-year-old is.
The masking part of Stoddard’s answer is infuriating for other reasons. Stoddard’s department requires all 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds to wear masks in daycare, school, church, Home Depot, and McDonald’s, yet his department also counts those very children as effectively unmasked even when they’re wearing masks.
Montgomery County’s health department is admitting that there’s no point in masking little children — yet they require little children to wear masks.
These health policies are not grounded in sound science or even logic.
