Time and again, we’ve been told that we’re making too big a deal out of COVID-19 because the percentage of deaths is supposedly not enough to worry about. They forget, though, that it’s not just the deaths. One of the biggest reasons that this is one virus you don’t want to get is how it saddles people with debilitating complications—strokes, blood clots, kidney and heart damage, and more.
The latest to learn this is the Lanthorn family of Waxhaw, North Carolina—just east of my hometown of Charlotte. Their eldest daughter, eight-year-old Addie, caught COVID-19 in August, not long after the start of school. She initially had a mild case—but for the better part of the last three months, Addie has been saddled with a particularly debilitating case of long COVID. And her mom, Sara, points the finger squarely at her area school board’s refusal to mandate masks.
Waxhaw is in Union County, a fast-growing suburban county southeast of Charlotte. It is one of the few school boards on the North Carolina side of the Charlotte metro area that doesn’t require kids to wear masks if they attend school in person, despite Gov. Roy Cooper strongly recommending that schools require masks. On multiple occasions, most recently on Thursday, the Union County school board has voted to make masks optional. At one point, the board even voted to end contact tracing and quarantines for asymptomatic kids, but was forced to reinstate them after state health secretary Mandy Cohen threatened to issue an abatement order that would have allowed the state to take over school buildings. Masks still remain optional.
Sara Lanthorn believes her daughter is paying the price for the board’s obstinacy. She told The Charlotte Observer (sorry, it’s paywalled) that while she sent Addie to third grade wearing a mask, Addie still tested positive for COVID-19 on Aug. 31, about a week into the school year. She seemed to be recovering well, but it turned out the worst was yet to come.
Addie’s bout with COVID-19 was relatively mild, her mom said. She never ran a fever, only complained of headaches and she returned to school after she cleared her 10 days. But lingering fatigue made it difficult for her to make it through her days. Then came the breathing problems and body aches.
Shortly after those symptoms, Addie started losing her toenails. The morning before she lost her first toenail she was hysterically crying, trying to put on socks and shoes to go to school, saying that it hurt really bad. At first, Sara thought she must have stubbed her toe, but she couldn’t remember anything happening. All of her toes began to hurt and she wore a boot to school the next day to keep the pressure off her toes.
She lost two more, including a big toenail. The skin underneath was so sensitive it would bleed. Over the course of the next week, she lost all 10 toenails. The doctor diagnosed her with COVID toes.
Addie’s toenails are so weak that whenever they try to grow back, they end up falling back off.
Sara shed more light on this in an interview with local ABC affiliate WSOC-TV. Apparently Addie didn’t get enough oxygen flowing to her feet during her initial bout with COVID-19. Researchers are still trying to figure out what causes ”COVID toes,” though recent research suggests they’re a product of the immune system going into overdrive to fend off the virus. Whatever the case, Sara told WSOC-TV that doctors aren’t sure if Addie’s toenails will ever grow back, and she could be dealing with “a lifetime of issues” after being “perfectly healthy” for most of her life. Her feet hurt so much that her parents have to wrap her feet so she can sleep.
According to The Observer and WSOC-TV, Addie she still has headaches, an irregular heartbeat, and nerve pain. She hasn’t fully regained her senses of taste and smell. She’s had to miss six weeks of dance class, and is just now able to resume even limited activity. She also has to deal with rapid heartbeats and body aches, and can’t go up stairs without having to stop and catch her breath. It really gets bad for her when it gets cold and rainy; the pain in her feet becomes almost as bad as adult arthritis, and she finds it even harder to breathe.
In mid-October, Sara took to Facebook to share what her daughter has had to live with in the last three months.
As far as Sara is concerned, the Union County school board is to blame.
Addie’s family says the debate over the polarized issue of masks in schools often has overlooked what happens to children when they survive COVID-19 and go on to have significant health problems.
The local school board’s decision to not require masks enraged Addie’s mother, along with many others who have protested in recent months. Those in favor of kids wearing masks could dutifully send their student to school with a face covering on — but whether they were really protected would be dictated by the choices of others.
Sara Lanthorn says the district’s lack of a mask requirement at the height of the Delta strain infecting children “took away their right to a safe environment.”
According to Sara, most of Addie’s third grade classmates weren’t wearing masks, nor were others at her elementary school.
This isn’t the first time that Union County has had its head up its rear end about the coronavirus. Last year, one of my friends, a middle school teacher in the county, was appalled at system leaders’ refusal to even consider going into virtual mode, despite having critical community spread. She’s had to homeschool her son for the last two years because he has breathing problems that make it far too dangerous for him to go to school in person. Apparently this system hasn’t learned; at one point, the Union district had as many confirmed and active COVID-19 cases as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which is three times as large.
For some time, a meme has been circulating around the tubes, claiming that it’s cruel to make kids wear masks. Tell that to families like the Lanthorns. Because their local school board isn’t willing to do its utmost to keep kids in school, in person and safe, their daughter may be saddled with debilitating complications for the rest of her life.