Sacrificing children because of Covid fear....

Young children are often the most vulnerable members of our society, they can't advocate for themselves and rely on community support networks to protect them.  Places like school, church, sports teams, clubs and camps.  When children are abused it is not the parents turning themselves in or calling for investigations, it's teachers, coaches and other community workers who've been trained to recoginze the signs.

I'm a parent, and it is a stressful job regardless.  Add in circumstances like losing a job or a business, of having to survive on inadequate goverment welfare cheques and it can be a recipe for disaster.  Toss in booze being declared essential and the word tragic doesn't begin to describe the horror some kids are very likely facing right now.  

And everyone says "Yeah...buh, buh, buh, but Covid".

Now pull your head out of your nether regions and look at the data.  About 8,500 Canadians dead, 75% of whom were residents in LTC facilities where people are old, sick and dying.  The vast majority unable to dress, bathe, feed or go to the bathroom withoug assistance, most congitively impaired with conditions like cardiovascular and kidney diseases.    

If anyone tries to tell me that we can't do our best to keep the novel coronavirus out of LTCs, AND keep our schools and other support networks for children open, they're going to have a very hard time.  Even with schools closed we've done a horrible job of protecting the old and vulerable.  We couldn't do any worse than what's been done already.  

People die in Canada, almost 800 every single day, and that was BEFORE covid. It sucks, but it happens.  And we should not be sacrificing young children in hopes that maybe someone in a nursing home will survive to have a few more months of diaper changes.  

I teach Sunday School, or at least I used to until mid March of this year.  Before I could though I had to have a vulnerable sector check done by the police, and I had to attend a training session that taught what to look for and what to do if abuse is suspected. 

All that is gone now.  Kids aren't seeing their teachers, their coaches or other community members, even play dates are discouraged or banned.  I'm genuniely terrified about what we're going to be finding out if child advocacy experts are right.  Hopefully pediatricians like Michelle Ward are wrong, she's quoted in the following article as saying that abuse hasn't gone away now, it's simply not being reported because we've removed vital and life saving networks.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/04/01/news/child-abuse-will-spike-amid-covid-19-crisis-advocates-warn

Maybe they'll be as wrong as the medical science professionals who said that places like Ontario were going to be seeing people lined up 10 deep to be put on a ventilator.  That was the reason emergency measures were put in place after all, you can't change the script when the predictions have been proven horribly wrong.  

Sadly I don't think the child advocacy experts will be as wrong as the medical science people were when they forecasted the severity of Covid with nothing but bad assumptions and computer simulations.