August 13, 2021
Dear editor;
Thank you Shaw Media’s Shea Lazansky for focusing on the pro-mask attitudes of our high school students during the School District 308 Board meeting August 9 (Ledger, August 12).
These students stressed the importance of wearing masks to protect themselves, their friends and family, while many parents stressed their individual rights to keep their children from wearing masks. I am so proud of these students, my grandchildren, and other children who have demonstrated the moral code of responsibility to protect themselves and others’ rights to live by wearing masks.
Even though the Delta Variant became more invasive to our young between the July 12 and August 9 school board meetings, parents’ mask-resistant attitudes didn’t change to match that reality. They denied knowing that more young people, children, and even babies are in ICU (intensive care unit) from Delta. Some may have damage to their bodies and minds for the rest of their lives, and some who are dying. So it’s just not true that children can escape the ravages of Delta, when so many anti-maskers claim they can.
The Delta Variant finds a welcome home in the unvaccinated. If you won’t vaccinate, at least wear a mask. The unvaccinated doubling up with the unmasked is giving full steam ahead to the Delta Variant to mutate even more rapidly into more deadly variants. Delta is screaming at the top of its lungs, but anti-maskers refuse to hear because of misinformation swirling in their heads.
You’re kidding yourself if you think that this mutating COVID-19 virus is a hoax, or no worse than the flu which is a bad enough, or that your immune system is strong enough to resist it. Hospital ICU beds are filling with more than 90% unvaccinated patients; imagine your child as one of them, perhaps too young to vaccinate yet, but could have worn a mask as protection. Imagine your child facing this deadly virus alone (because you can’t be with them). They even may need to be sent to another state for care due to hospital capacity being overwhelmed. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Protect our children with masks and vaccines when they are available to them.
Judy Siedlecki, Oswego