One of the hallmarks of Governor Brown's poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Oregon has been her complete and total disregard for the mental health, physical well-being, and education of our kids. While other states have had kids doing in-person class with minimal issues since the beginning of the year, and schools in places in Denmark and Sweden had kids in school last spring after the initial lockdown, Kate Brown has steadfastly refused to allow Oregon's kids back in school, using arbitrary "community infection" rates with arbitrarily high standards to purposely prevent our kids from being in school where they belong.

On November 30th, Oregon Public Broadcasting published an interview with Dr. Dawn Nolt, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital. The point of what Dr. Nolt had to say was that kids are safe in school, because they simply do not spread the virus to others.

Here are some highlights:

Geoff Norcross: How likely are children to get the virus in the first place?

Dawn Nolt: The preponderance of studies suggests that kids are approximately half as susceptible to getting the virus as adults. There was a nice review published in October that looked at 14 other studies, and they showed that kids under 10 years of age were significantly less likely to get infected compared to the other members of their household.

If a kid gets the virus, how likely are they to get sick from it?

Nolt: Kids show minimal, if any, symptoms from COVID-19. If they do get sick, it’s the usual COVID symptoms we hear about, such as cough, fever, fatigue and loss of smell. If they do get sick, they’re much less likely to have serious problems compared to older individuals.

How likely are kids to pass the virus on to others if they get it?

Nolt: The impression from early studies in the pandemic [is] that kids seem to be less contagious than adults. And we’re also seeing an age differential in that the younger kids, such as those less than 10 to 12 years of age, don’t pass the virus very efficiently to other adults.

How has our understanding of the infectiousness of kids changed since March, if at all?

Nolt: That’s something that, thankfully, we seem to have gotten right from the very beginning. We understand how viruses work in kids. We have established patterns. We understand how it can spread from a child into the community. And we know this pattern particularly well in influenza, that kids can drive the infection rates in schools and in communities. But when the COVID-19 pandemic started and continues to run, we’ve consistently noticed that we’re not seeing the pattern that children are driving the transmission rates in the community.

From your perspective, as a pediatrician and as an infectious diseases specialist, what do you think all this means for this very difficult question of whether to open schools to in-person instruction?

Nolt: We have an overarching goal of child health, [which] we know includes good education. So in the discussion about in-person education, we should show the data that kids are less likely to become sick. And if they do get sick, they’re less likely to pass it on to others. And that these observations seem particularly true in the younger children, such as those that are in primary grades.

When we talk about when to start and when to continue in-person education, we should remember that kids don’t drive COVID-19 infection in the community, at large or within schools, particularly if they’re wearing masks.

When even the Great Flip-Flopper Dr. Fauci comes out and says that kids need to be in school, you might think Kate, and her enablers at Oregon Health Authority, Patrick Allen and Dean Sidelinger, would pay attention, but to date, they still know better than all the doctors and other medical professionals that have been screaming from the rooftops for months.