Child care centres ‘day by day’ amid illness waves

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This article was published 23/11/2022 (762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With so many pre-school children and staff who look after them sick, local nursery schools and daycares have been forced to temporarily close their doors or cut hours.

Whether it is COVID-19, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), flu or the common cold, parents are having to stay home with sick kids while child-care staff try to look after the clients they can with reduced numbers.

“I kept hearing about sickness in the community, and we didn’t have it, so I thought we might get by this — and then you can say we were good until we weren’t,” Cathy Gardiner, executive director of Learning and Growing Daycare in Charleswood, said Thursday.

“We have 22 pre-schoolers away — that’s a quarter of our kids. And we also have three of our 13 staff on top of that. We’re just bracing to be able to get through this. We know it will go through everyone — I know how this works.”

Gardiner, who has worked in child care for three decades, said except for closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she has never seen so many children and staff sick all at once.

“We had a lot of calls in the morning, from parents saying their children were sick, but then by 10 o’clock, we were sending kids home with fevers and they were throwing up.”

Gardiner said the Winnipeg centre hadn’t heard about any recent cases of COVID-19 — “I don’t know if anyone is testing” — but throughout the pandemic, staff have continued to clean and sanitize the facility.

Another Manitoba nursery school operator, who didn’t want to be named, said their facility closed Wednesday and won’t reopen until Nov. 28.

“For the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen at least 50 per cent of the kids away each day,” she said. “We were shut Monday morning, because I didn’t have enough staff, but I reopened in the afternoon.

“It’s just taking it day by day. I’m hoping by forcing everyone to stay home for four days they will get better and we can open again on Monday.”

Jodie Kehl, Manitoba Child Care Association executive director, said those child-care operations are not alone.

A survey sent out to its hundreds of members earlier this week to gauge the sickness situation has already returned more than 350 responses, Kehl said.

“What we are hearing is over 87 per cent of facilities are experiencing high absenteeism because of RSV, COVID, the flu and even the common cold,” she said. “The common cold is the most prevalent… at 91 per cent of the ones who reported sickness.

“This is a pretty clear picture of what is happening in the province.”

The flu has hit 77 per cent of facilities, while RSV is at 36 per cent and COVID at 24 per cent, she added.

Kehl said while some child care facilities are being hit harder than others, they are all experiencing higher-than-normal sickness rates.

“They report almost 25 per cent of the children are reporting sick on a daily basis, with the highest ones at 50 to 70 per cent,” she said.

“We’re already suffering because of staff shortages and now it’s exacerbated by absences. Some have had to shorten hours because they don’t have enough staff, others have had to close… It is a stark reality.”

Kehl said parents are frustrated because they can’t bring sick children to daycares and nursery schools, or they get a call in the middle of the day while at work to come pick up their ill child.

While it is not being mandated by the provincial government, having everyone wear masks or at least have the staff don them would help combat the viruses’ spread, she added.

“Almost three years after COVID came here, we are still seeing chaos,” Kehl said.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca