Camp Edition, Summer 2021
Author: Avital O’Glasser, MD
Keywords: COVID, children, child care, vaccinations, volunteerism, parenting
Yes, I sent my kid to sleep away camp this summer.
Three weeks away from home, during the second summer of a global pandemic--three glorious, special, amazing weeks of being a kid, surrounded by other kids, reclaiming what he had missed last summer.
My oldest needed to go to sleep away camp this summer...he just had to! I’m not saying this because he needed time away from our intense bubbled family experience, or needed a long break from screen time, or because his younger brother needed a chance to be an only child for three weeks. (Well, those are all true, but they weren’t the driving reasons.) My husband and I stand by every decision we have made to keep our kids safe during this pandemic--and we knew, and TRUSTED, that sending him to camp was the right decision.*
Planning for summer 2021, and the anticipation of being able to attend, began almost as soon as we received word of cancellation in Spring 2020. Cancelling camp was a difficult decision, but the right one to make.
For full transparency, I joined the camp’s Board of Directors last fall and then became the chair of its medical committee. Some days I wondered why I took on this role with my limited spare time as a physician-mom living and working during a pandemic. However, this camp is an incredibly special part of my family and our community. Giving my time to support the camp, reinforce its core values of community engagement and collective responsibility, and role model responsible responses to the pandemic was the right way to spend my time.
Planning for a successful Summer 2021 began early in 2020. It would take energy, effort, resources, advocacy, activism, leadership, communication, community engagements, creativity, and trust--skills necessary to any element of pandemic response. It includes the innovative leadership of the camp’s executive director to form the Washington State Camp Coalition to bring camp leadership together and work closely with the governor’s office and public health officials. It took intimate knowledge of the guidance provided by the American Camp Association.
We convened the robust, interdisciplinary medical committee early in 2021, even before many healthcare professionals had received their second COVID vaccine dose. As the months counted down to drop off day, we had more reasons to be cautiously optimistic--vaccine eligibility for educators and camp staff, widespread vaccinations for adults, vaccines for 16 and older, and finally vaccines for 12 and older about a month before camp started.
Even as reports began to trickle in of summer camp outbreaks elsewhere in the country, we retained our sense of trust--trust in our planning, trust in the science and the protocols, trust in the guidance from the state and professional organizations, trust in the camp leadership and its staff, and trust in our community to do their part before sending their kids. Entry to camp required negative test results and low risk behavior in the days preceding arrival. Once on site, everyone went through screening testing multiple times. Staff had to be vaccinated and had new limitations for day-off activities. Podding, social distancing between individual bunks, masking, daily symptom screening and low thresholds for symptom-based testing were all implemented. The mental health support was also ramped up, anticipating that “re-entry” might be challenging for some kids.
The first round of universal screening tests came back once, then twice for session one. We repeated that success for session 2, and then session 3.
My kiddo, who attended session 1, came home over a month ago--tired, dirty, and incredibly happy. By the time I write this, camp has officially ended for the summer--the last campers went home last Wednesday.
They did it. Camp did it. We did it. Our community did it.
A COVID-free summer of 2021 was not easy--but it was doable through the combination of leadership, proactive planning, organization, community engagement, and trust. Had we been facing the Delta variant surge at the beginning of the summer, would we have been as successful? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that hundreds of kids got to be kids with other kids for weeks this summer. And I do know that my kiddo will be going back next summer--in fact, our early bird registration is already complete.
* I am not revealing the name of the camp to protect my children’s privacy
About the Author: Avital O’Glasser, MD, is a hospitalist at Oregon Health & Science University and the editor of the WIMS blog (Twitter: @aoglasser).
