Daycare Exclusion Policies Harmed Working Families
It is counterintuitive, but when my infant son tested positive for Covid-19 in early 2022, my husband and I breathed a sigh of relief because it meant a short but welcome 90-day reprieve from Covid testing and daycare exclusions.
Take, for example, the District of Columbia’s exclusion and return-to-care criteria issued by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). Under OSSE’s initial policies, Covid exposures triggered mandatory 10-day exclusion from care for children under the age of 2. In comparison, children over the age of 2 could return to care if they received a negative test on the fifth day after exposure, under the questionable theory that children over the age of 2 could “wear” masks. For parents like us, with children under 2, the process was draconian and deprived us of paid childcare even when our child was not sick.
As any parent who has had children in daycare knows, colds and other viruses can run rampant. But because of OSSE’s policies, we found ourselves regularly having our son tested just so we could access the care we had already paid for. Making this process more difficult, and expensive, was the fact that at-home rapid tests were not approved for children under the age of 2, so every sniffle or cough required a visit to the pediatrician, urgent care, or testing facility to clear him so he could return to care, and we could go to work. Test results sometimes took days to come in, causing additional time away from care and work. With policies like this in place, it comes as little surprise that many parents, particularly mothers, left the workforce during this time.[1]
The 10-day exclusion policy stood in stark contrast to those for other highly contagious childhood illnesses like hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Those viruses do not require quarantining children or mandatory 10-day exclusions from care. The policies imposed on children under the age of 2 and their families also turned out to be divorced from scientific reality. As research now shows, infectivity in children after a positive test result has a median duration of only three days.[2]
In the spring of 2022, just weeks after our 90-day reprieve ended, there were back-to-back Covid exposures in our son’s daycare. We lost 14 days of care due to mandatory exclusion polices even though he never got sick and did not test positive, possibly because he had developed natural immunity from contracting Covid himself earlier in the year. From just those incidents, we estimated that we lost the benefit of over $1,500 in paid care. These policies hurt working families like mine, but I have long given up any hopes of an apology or remuneration.
[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/pandemic-pushes-mothers-of-young-children-out-of-the-labor-force.
[2] https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/covid-children-contagious-infection-days-school/.
April 18, 2025