How do parents manage symptomatic children? Social-distancing insights for COVID-19 and seasonal influenza

ABSTRACT

Strategies for controlling pandemics include social distancing. Using data from a 2016 nation-wide survey pertaining to influenza, (generalized) ordered logit models are developed to identify the factors associated with the relative frequency (never/sometimes/always) a household (a) isolates a sick child from others in the household, (b) keeps the sick child out of school/daycare, (c) stops the child’s social activities, (d) has a parent stay home to care for the child, and (e) has another adult care for the child. Marital status is non-significant for isolation practices but is significant in caregiving. Married individuals are 25% more likely to report a parent always staying home with a sick child. Males are more likely to report never isolating a sick child (6%, 3%, and 2% for actions a, b, and c, respectively) and 3% more likely to never have a parent stay home. Individuals knowledgeable about the disease are 10% more likely to always keep a sick child home from school/daycare. Parents are 27% more likely to always stay home with an infant. Individuals who had never worn masks (before the survey) are less likely to isolate a child within the household, but do not act significantly differently with respect to school/daycare.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• influenza
• COVID-19
• isolation
• caregiving
• schools

Data availability statement

The survey data used in this study is available upon request. Please send your request for survey data to the correspondence email address. The data is considered proprietary but can be made available to the reviewers to replicate the results, pending IRB approval.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [1R01GM109718], for which the authors are grateful. However, the authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper.