Ep. 315: Is it safe to send your kids back to school?

Guest: Dr. Chana Davis, PhD

It’s coming up on a month since schools reopened in British Columbia.

If you’re a parent, did you send your children back into the classroom? If you did, why? And if you didn’t, why not? Was your decision based on watching and reading the news? Were you influenced by social media or other parents?

Was your decision about your children’s education based on anecdotal evidence or was it based on facts? Did you dig into the numbers? Dr. Chana Davis has a PhD in genetics and a deep background in biomedical sciences and she is the mother of three elementary-aged children. Dr. Davis struggled like all parents with the same question about sending her children back to school.

She turned to the Harvard Global Health Institute for guidance to help measure the risk. The Institute says less than 10 new cases per day per 100,000 people is a signal to be cautious but it’s not high-risk. Then she looked at the local risk in her community. Davis says, “Show me the data. In Vancouver between August 21 and September the 3rd, there were 307 cases, which when divided into 14 days equals 22 cases per day. Then divide the population of the city into that figure to learn, that means there were three new daily cases per 100,000 people. That puts Vancouver at the bottom end of the Yellow or cautious zone.”

Davis crunched her way through the numbers and determined there is “about a 4% chance of being exposed to COVID-19.” Davis goes on to say, “I don’t think I’m crazy to send my kids to school in a pandemic – at least my local slice of it. We live in a Yellow Zone. Opening schools, with ample precautions, makes sense.”

We invited Dr. Chana Davis, host of the video podcast “Get Real Health” and author of “Fueled by Science,'' to join us for a Conversation That Matters about how she decided it was okay to send her children back to school.