Unmasked children in Utah to get Delta variant in school, infectious disease expert says

Utah now has a law prohibiting schools from requiring masks.

When the unvaccinated, unmasked Utah children return to school in a few weeks, they will be transmitting the delta variant of COVID-19 to each other. It’s only a matter of time, according to an infectious disease physician at Intermountain Medical Center.

“We have a very, very transmissible virus,” said Dr Eddie Stenehjem. “You are going to see this virus spread in schools. And then these children will take the virus home and pass it on to sensitive parents and grandparents. It’s just a fact.

Coronavirus vaccines have not been approved for children under 12, so elementary schools across the state will be filled with unvaccinated children. And, according to the Utah Department of Health, only one-third of Utahns between the ages of 12 and 18 have been fully immunized; just over 42% received at least one dose.

Stenehjem recommends that children wear masks at school, but this would be completely voluntary. The state legislature passed – and Governor Spencer Cox signed – a bill banning mask warrants in Utah.

[Read more: With mask requirements forbidden, how are Utah schools planning to cope with the coronavirus?]

Stenehjem pointed to the disclosed report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the delta variant appears to spread as easily as chickenpox, “which is an incredibly transmissible virus. … I think we have to realize that this is a different virus than the one we faced last fall or last winter. “

“We know that if you put 30 people in a closed room, you will get a transmission.” And Stenehjem is “skeptical” that measures such as spacing desks 3 feet apart, increasing airflow, and focusing on washing desks. hands will prevent the spread of the delta variant.

“We know masking works,” he said. “And I would say if I had a school-aged child… I would make sure they went back to school in masks.”

Getting students to wear masks indoors during class limits transmission of the coronavirus, said Dr Andrew Pavia, chief of the pediatric infectious disease division at the University of Utah Health.

“We know we can operate schools in person, safely, with a mask,” Pavie said during a U.’s Facebook Live session. of U. Health Friday. “We also know of other countries in the world, where the masking has not been done, schools can have explosive epidemics.”

Pavie cited data collected for Project Utah HERO, a large study designed to collect information about the transmission of COVID-19 to inform policymakers in Utah. “The gist of what we learned was that you can safely keep schools open – and we did that successfully in Utah – when you have universal masking in schools, when you do your better to maintain decent distances between students, ”Pavia said.

In addition, Pavie said, “children tolerate masks. They don’t like them – I don’t like wearing masks, you don’t like wearing masks – but the kids do really well. And they don’t have a political agenda whereby masks take away their freedom.

It’s not just school children who should wear masks, Stenehjem said. The Intermountain doctor backs the CDC’s latest recommendation to wear masks indoors. Research shows that fully vaccinated people can get and pass the delta variant without even knowing they have it.

The data also shows that the states with the lowest vaccination rates have the highest number of cases, and Utah is currently No. 11 for the highest number of cases per 100,000 population. About 46% percent of all Utahns are fully immunized.

“It just comes down to the fact that the vaccines work,” Stenehjem said. “Vaccines prevent cases, they prevent hospitalizations, they prevent deaths. It is not rocket science.

And he fended off false reports that vaccines caused many deaths. “I haven’t seen or heard of a vaccine-related death in our system,” Stenhjem said. “I have seen hundreds of deaths from COVID-19. “

He admitted that there had been “rare complications from the vaccine”. And that some people were admitted to the hospital because of these complications, treated and released. “But this perception that this vaccine causes death is not what [we] have seen.

“I hear people say, ‘Oh, these are new vaccines that haven’t been studied.’ I would push that back and say – I can’t think of a vaccine that’s been more scrutinized than this vaccine. “

Adverse reactions to vaccines occur within two months of being administered, and there are now “seven or eight months” of data from “the millions and millions of people who have received these vaccines.”

The danger of not getting vaccinated is not just for the individual, it is for the entire population. As the virus is transmitted to more and more people, “these are opportunities to develop mutations,” Stenehjem said. And these mutations could be more severe or even more easily transmitted – as we have seen with the delta variant in India and the Lambda variant in South America.

“It could also lead to vaccine leakage, which means this vaccine is no longer effective against this variant,” he said. “And so what we can say is that the more transmission we have in a community, the more likely we’re going to see a mutant come out of it that potentially has adverse effects.”