Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/a-challenging-balancing-act-managing-child-illness-in-early-care-and-education-settings/5027180/
The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of great uncertainty for the early care and education community. Thousands of ECE providers, directors, owners, and preschool teachers were forced to overcome unexpected pandemic-related challenges and barriers in caring for young children in ECE environments. The pandemic revealed to the rest of the country how essential ECE programs were for our society to function, and ECE providers rose to the challenge (Hashikawa et al., 2020).
In the midst of the pandemic, many ECE programs were on the verge of closing due to financial constraints and low enrollment numbers, with many programs forced to close their doors permanently (ChildCareAware, 2020). ECE providers became adept at performing daily health checks, screening for symptoms to ensure children were appropriately excluded and quarantined, cleaning and disinfecting, and implementing mitigation measures such as masking. Fortunately, the SARS-CoV-2 virus affected children less severely compared to adults (Dawood et al., 2022; Laws et al., 2021). While COVID-19 spread occurred in ECE programs and schools, these settings did not seem to accelerate community spread.
However, as we transitioned away from the COVID-19 pandemic this past winter, we saw a resurgence of many cold viruses that were temporarily dormant during the pandemic due to COVID-19 ...