Why on Earth are we still debating summer camp?

Let’s not pretend COVID-19 poses great risk to kids

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released guidance for the safe operations of day and overnight camps for children during the summer of 2021. Notably it envisions campers wearing masks all day every day (except when eating, drinking or sleeping), maintaining three feet between each other and six feet from staff members at all times, and eschewing any indoor or “close-contact” sporting activities.

The guidance was poorly received, from the finest libertarian salons (“the government has essentially recommended that summer camps treat kids like prisoners,” Robby Soave wrote at Reason magazine) to the pediatric academy. “The CDC’S recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless,” Dr. Mark Gorelik, a pediatric immunologist at Columbia University, told New York Magazine. “Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree (Fahrenheit) weather wearing a mask. Period.”

The CDC almost seems more concerned about younger people than older ones. As Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam very helpfully reminded us on Saturday, because it’s just the sort of thing we all need to hear right now, vaccination isn’t a 100-per-cent guarantee against acquiring or spreading COVID-19. The CDC will tell you the same, yet it has mandated a whole slew of freedoms that fully vaccinated people can now enjoy, including unmasked indoor visits and ditching masks outside.

For sleepaway summer camps, at least, the CDC suggests masks might safely be doffed when campers and staff are within their cohorts. But considering how closed an environment a summer camp is normally, and how much more closed it could be in a pandemic, and how low the risk is to otherwise healthy children, the advice still seems weirdly draconian.

It’s only advice, though. And at least it vouches safe the basic concept: “Consistent and layered use of multiple prevention strategies can help camps open safely for in-person activities,” the CDC explains.

Here in Canada, camps don’t even have that. Camp owners and their associations are begging to be told whether or not they can reopen this summer under any circumstances at all. Some have already folded their tents amidst the uncertainty. Many others are running out of runway, financially or in terms of time to make necessary renovations. This isn’t a decision that can be made a couple of weeks in advance.

Ontario’s government promises it’s thinking about it. But it seems to be thinking about it quite badly. “You have to be very careful in those settings because (people) are in very close contact,” Dr. David Williams, the province’s impossibly gormless chief medical health officer, told reporters last week. “We’ve got to get out of this third wave and we’ve got to keep it suppressed. So we don’t want to have an overnight camp situation becoming a very sad situation.”

This is madness. The risk otherwise healthy children run from COVID-19 is of a degree that’s miles below your average parent’s non-pandemic radar. Compare the 11 Canadians under 20 who have died from COVID-19 to 185 in the same age group who died in 2019 from cancer and 316 from accidental injuries, for example.

But let’s imagine that COVID-19 was actually far more harmful to children than it is. Society is reopening, parents have to go back to work. Come summer, there won’t be even online schooling to keep children notionally occupied. One way or the other they have to do things, go places, interact with other human beings. In that scenario, surely it’s difficult to imaginable a safer environment for kids and young adults — and the adults to whom they might otherwise spread the virus — than a summer camp with some major pandemic tweaks: quarantine and testing before and/or on arrival (and before departure), cohorting, no visitors, staff spending their days off onsite, and so on.

There is plenty of expert evidence on the camps’ side: evidence of the horrifying toll the lockdowns are taking on children’s development and mental health, and evidence supporting summer camps as safe environments. Dr. Earl Rubin, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Montreal Children’s Hospital, was one of 90 physicians to sign an open letter way back in March. "After 12 months of the pandemic, we believe that it is our duty, as a society, to offer our young people the summer they deserve, far from the anguish of the health crisis,” it read.

For now, camp proponents have been pretty polite in beseeching their governments. I would suggest they get militant, but I’m not honestly sure it would help. The province’s golfists have been politely asking for courses to be reopened, and they have lots of smart medical folks backing them up as well, on the well-established principle that outdoors is good.

“I’m sorry,” a Premier’s Office source told the Toronto Star last week, “but we are not opening golf courses before we open schools.”

It’s like they spun a Wheel of Non-sequiturs: “No cinemas before golf!” “No indoor dining before paintball!” But if it signifies a special concern for children, that concern could be usefully displayed — tomorrow — by promising camps they will be allowed to open, and indeed by helping as many kids as possible to attend.