Emergency Youth Authorization
When I try to say the phrase Emergency Use Authorization, more often than not I trip and find myself uttering Emergency Youth Authorization instead. It happens so frequently that I have started to get in my own head about it, pausing before the three words come out of my mouth, only to hear what is now an inevitable use/youth swap. And then this morning, as I listened to a recent episode of The Daily (an excellent recap of where we are in the pandemic trajectory, by the way, which I highly recommend spending 25 minutes listening to), I heard coronavirus guru Donald G. McNeil Jr. and host Michael Barbaro do the same thing, not just once but over and over again. Vindication! After the fifth or sixth utterance, it also dawned on me: what a perfect Freudian slip. These days, the vast majority of COVID news rehashes an increasingly heated debate over the return to school and the authorization of how and where our youth will spend their days and nights. Should they be attending in-person college? Or high school? Or in pre-school even? Can online learning be effective? Or do all of the shortcomings of education-by-Zoom, not the least of which is screen overload, outweigh the benefits of virtual access to education? Should kids play sports? Or video games? What are the risks to them when they are outside versus indoors? Socializing versus isolating? With no right answers, just dire predictions, it seems we are all simply waiting for some sort of Emergency Youth Authorization.
There are no answers because this entire subject was born seven months ago – nine if you follow international news and paid attention to what was going on in China in December. Despite the fact that there are lots of smart people working furiously to solve this crisis, nine months does not an expert make. China first reported a cluster of novel coronavirus cases on December 31, 240 days ago, which is 5,760 hours, just barely halfway to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours necessary to become world-class expert at anything. Yes, virologists and epidemiologists have deep knowledge of viral and human behavioral patterns respectively, but no one has even celebrated a first anniversary with Sars-CoV-2, aka the novel coronavirus.
When I teach kids about health and wellness, I always tell them that every piece of advice or body information they will learn applies equally to the adults in their lives. From nutrition to body care to the power of sleep, the lessons of how to live healthfully know no age limits. So, while I am in search of an Emergency Youth Authorization, I know in my heart that the recommendations for kids are really no different than the ones we should all be following. The parameters around when and how they should return to school can be applied directly to our work; suggestions about how they socialize, why they might become depressed, and how to avoid Zoom fatigue turn out to be nearly identical for us, too. In the end, maybe Emergency Youth Authorization is not the right term at all. Maybe Emergency Use-Your-Common-Sense-and-Also-Your-Prefrontal-Cortex Authorization is more like it. Either way, for crying out loud, please people who are on your way to 10,000 hours with this global tyrant of a virus, give us some clear parameters to live by. And likewise, for those of us who are not specialists here, in advance of the absolutely inevitable next wave of infection, let’s start following the advice they’ve already laid out: distance, hand washing, and wearing a mask over your nose and mouth because masking the chin and neck is like blowing your nose while holding a tissue to your ear.
It’s time for links! Today, a few about COVID…
You are bound to hear a lot of buzz in the next few days about this breaking article questioning the evidence for 6 feet of distancing.
This week, a man who had coronavirus infection in March was shown to be reinfected with a new strain in August, bringing up lots of questions about the immune system’s response to the infection – this article explores the four different scenarios of coronavirus immunity.
Are boys handling the pandemic better than girls? And if so, do video games deserve the credit?
In case you are looking for the next gen, super cool hand sanitizer dispenser, here are 7 of them!
And a few links that have nothing whatsoever to do with this pandemic…
Anti-vitamins are a thing. I know, I had never heard of them either.
Some things never change, like the artificial sweetener weight debate…
…and the never-ending quest to figure out why your face is breaking out even well into adulthood.
Meanwhile, this: people would rather be shocked – literally, electrically shocked – than bored.
And now for the meme. Cheers!
