Re‐childing the COVID‐19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un‐childed public.

Summary: For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk‐averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID‐19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un‐child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the story of how children infiltrated MIQ's age‐segregated spatial–temporal boundaries to inadvertently or deliberately deliver unique forms of care to others with whom they otherwise had no contact. If MIQ represents a microcosmic refraction of New Zealand's adult‐centric structure, then children's chalk drawings demand a radical rethinking of who and what constitutes public health care and remind us what we gain when we recognize what children do for us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]