Kids are getting Covid and feeling guilty about it. Here’s what you can say.
With the rise of the Omicron variant, the world is seeing an increase in kids getting sick and testing positive. We heard that many kids are feeling guilt and shame around getting infected, so we asked epidemiologist and author of A Kids Book About Covid-19 Malia Jones to tell us what’s important for kids and their grownups to hear.
If you got COVID recently… well, join the club. You’re in good company. A lot of people got COVID-19 in the last few weeks—over 17 million in the United States alone, just in the last month. The omicron variant is proving too much for a lot of the strategies we’ve been asking our kids to help with to protect us from COVID-19 over these last 22 months — like wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Even getting tested doesn’t work quite as well against the omicron variant. And if you got COVID-19 after almost two years of putting in your best effort and you (or your kids) have big feelings about it, you’re not alone in that either.
A pandemic is not one person’s problem. It’s not one family’s problem. It’s not one school’s problem or one town’s problem or even one country’s problem. It’s a problem that belongs to all 7.8 billion people in the world.* And stopping a pandemic is not one person’s job, either.
Sometimes, health problems are caused by things that are much bigger than our own day-to-day decisions. Sometimes health problems are even caused by simple bad luck. If you get sick — with COVID-19 or anything else — it doesn’t mean you did something wrong. Viruses don’t attack people who deserve to get sick! In fact, they don’t have any intention at all. They don’t even have brains.
Yes, it’s true that by working together, we can end the pandemic. And part of working together is you and me doing what we can to stop it — getting vaccinated, wearing masks, testing, and being careful. But our part is just one tiny part in a much bigger solution. Working together also means schools and states and whole countries working together to make good policies that make tests more accessible, offer clear guidance about what to do, and ensure that everyone in the world has access to vaccines. It means neighbors working together, scientists working together, news reporters working together. Politicians working together. And, ending a pandemic will take some good luck, too.
So, whether you did everything you could to avoid getting COVID-19 or not, getting COVID-19 is not a judgment on your behavior. Good people get sick all the time. We each do what we can, but the problem is bigger than any of us.
*A billion is bigger than you think! If you want to think about how many people that is, check out this video from TechLaboratories, “How big is a billion? (No, it’s bigger than that!”)
