Lessons Learned from COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies for Youth

In this chapter, we will review lessons learned from COVID-19 mitigation strategies for youth. Pediatric COVID-19 and Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in children highlight the ongoing struggle with health inequity, vaccine hesitancy, and the fragile state of a child’s mental health. Specifically, we will explore school and community mitigation strategies which diminished. transmission of infections and the downstream effect of disease in children; however, the cost of this intervention was a decline in pediatric mental health. We describe public health mitigation efforts to circumvent systemic racism within and surrounding COVID-19 specific pediatric health care and, as a result, outline health care workers’ perception of COVID-19 vaccine and the hypothesized impact on the prolongation of the pandemic. While some mitigation efforts were successful, others were not. We seek to summarize the data published to (1) overcome hurdles presented by future pandemics and (2) prepare for endemic COVID-19.