Professor Karina Butler:

First, I would not want anybody to misinterpret what I was saying. Am I saying that it is a good thing for children to get this infection, akin to the chicken pox parties that people talked about? No, I am definitely not saying that. The onus on us is to protect our children from this infection because while most children, thankfully, have a mild illness and do not suffer consequences, there is the potential for significant illness and for the post-Covid inflammatory syndrome that some children experience. When we talked about it earlier, one of the Deputies referred to the numbers and the fact that, thankfully, there were as few as 30 children in ICUs related to Covid since the beginning of the pandemic and only eight of them were PCR-positive at the time, with acute infection. The others were there related to the inflammatory syndrome. Covid is not something that one wants to expose one's children to. The whole point is to reduce the force of infection in the community and having those people around the children vaccinated and protected so that children do not acquire infection.