Covid Support Thread
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Per Washington post 75% people in the Provincetown MA surge are vaccinated. So my guess is that behavior is driving the increased rate. Which sucks because people were excited to do things again.
I’m definitely hear more and more about breakthrough infections. My friend’s husband has cancer and tested positive last week (fully vaccinated). Thankfully, his symptoms have been mild she said (like, a flu). They have a kid (under 12, so unvaccinated) who they sent to the grandparents and everyone was tested yesterday but I haven’t heard what the results are. I was talking to another friend on the phone yesterday who has a group thread with a bunch of college friends who are spread out mostly around the east coast and two of them currently have breakthrough cases. One flew out to California to help out his mom as his dad was hospitalized with a breakthrough case. He got covid while he was there and brought it back home with him (didn’t have symptoms before he left) and potentially passed it along to his son (under 12) – it’s too early still to test him.
All of us with kids under 12 – ok, not all of us, but a lot of us – are kind of freaking out because the risk of getting breakthrough cases and passing it to our unprotected children has suddenly skyrocketed. I had a few weeks of feeling pretty safe and now I’m back to being very cautious. My friend I was talking to yesterday has kids the same age as mine and they’ve both been out of school this whole time too and we are in agreement that our kids are going back this September no matter what bc the damage to their social development, mental health, and academic skills will be a given if they don’t. A year and a half is the MAX kids this age can be out of school and not start to experience some major effects. We both would sacrifice anything to get them in school safely (even part-time! we’ll take a hybrid schedule!). We’d stay home around the clock until they can get vaccinated if that would help at all in keeping community levels lows enough to keep schools safe. Of course, it’s not up to just us, unfortunately…
I don’t want to blase about risk to kids-we’re all terrified about serious illness for our children. But the likelihood of a (non-infant) child getting hospitalized is extraordinarily small. In 2020-2021 the hospitalizations for kids were about 2-3 times what it was for flu during a typical flu season, which I think that most of us treated as a fairly negligible concern. A vaccinated middle aged person is more likely to be hospitalized than an unvaccinated child. And there is reason to think that even these very low numbers are overstating it since (A) they include children in the hospital for other things that test positive for COVID* (B) the denominator of kids that had COVID is almost certainly wildly undercounted since most of them have no or minor symptoms.
We are going to continue to take all available precautions with the Spawn of Fyodor, and I don’t want to be dismissive but it might be helpful to to keep in mind that the odds of something serious happening are extremely low.
*https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/05/covid-19-hospitalizations-among-kids-likely-overcounted.html
Yeah, I’m not so worried about the short-term effects like hospitalization; I’m much more concerned about long-term effects, some of which we already know about and some that I’m sure we don’t.
Fyodor: I took a look at that link you shared. The data for pediatric hospitalizations is from May 2020 through feb 2021, before the delta variant even emerged. It’s a much different scene now for our unvaxxed kids. Not to be hysterical and overly alarmist about it – the odds of a kid being hospitalized are still low, but I’m not sure they’re lower than the odds of a middle aged vaccinated person being hospitalized like you say. In fact, based on data I’ve seen, I know the odds are higher for an unvaxxed child. I’ve been following the CEOs of the two hospitals in Springfield Missouri, where delta first hit in the US. Every few days, they share stats about their hospitalized patients. They’ve had a total of about 15-20 children, from two weeks old to 18, hospitalized for covid complications (some needed ICU care, a few needed ventilators). There have been elderly fully vaccinated covid patients hospitalized (I can’t remember the number but they’ve made up around 8% of the overall total). But there have been zero middle aged fully vaccinated covid patients needing hospitalizations. The odds of needing hospitalization – at least in that region, at least during a Delta surge – we’re greater for unvaxxed children than their vaxxed parents.
Also, economist, Emily Oster, was the one who said “an unvaccinated child is like a vaccinated grandparent.” She was torn a new you know what for that remark by people who actually practice epidemiology and infectious disease for a living. Don’t listen to her!
My feeling through the pandemic and now with delta continues to be “could you forgive yourself?”. Meaning sure, the risk of a kidlet ending up in the hospital from COVID is unlikely, but could you forgive yourself if you stopped taking precautions and the kid got sick? That’s my measuring stick. I don’t have kids so for me to be around the children in my life is a choice. I have to choose to go out and about, travel, etc. to get to those wee ones.
For me, if my nephew became very sick (or suffered long term), I don’t think I’d forgive myself. We share a birthday; this year is a milestone for both of us, I don’t think we’ll be able to celebrate together (again). The only way I might make it work would be to quarantine, take the train, have dinner and take the train home. Not enough time would have passed to be contagious.
From a news article yesterday about the covid crisis in Louisiana and the enormous impact on kids: “ NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana children’s hospitals are currently filled to capacity with COVID patients, according to Children’s Hospital’s Physician-in-Chief.
As the Delta variant continues to spread, children across the state are being hospitalized with severe COVID related illnesses.
“I am as worried about our children today as I have ever been. This virus, the Delta variant of COVID, is every infectious disease specialist’s and epidemiologist’s worst nightmare,” said Dr. Mark Klein, Physician-in-Chief at Children’s Hospital and a Professor of Pediatrics at LSUHSC and Tulane.”
If you’re still thinking that the risk to kids is negligible, you’re wrong, I’m very sorry to say. The risk to unvaxxed kids is lower than that of unvaxxed adults. But it is NOT lower than vaccinated middle aged people by any stretch.
Does anyone have deja vu to the initial years of AIDS? It was steady on, don’t change course when AIDS was just the 4H club (Haitians, Heroin Users, Hemophiliacs and Homosexuals). When it magically appeared in white heterosexuals well now we had a problem.
When it was just blue states … COVID can’t touch us. When it was just old people and PoCs – well that’s fine, they have no societal value according to the GOP. That 20 something that was so sick she had to have a lung transplant? Anomaly! The hundreds of people who were between 30-50 who died (or nearly died)? Anomalies!
Now that their voting base is sick and dying (or coming to realize that they’ve been lied to and this is kinda serious) … NOW they are changing their idiotic tunes. And it’s an uphill battle because they’ve spent the last 18 months saying “your freedoms are being challenged”.
On a positive note – 3 GOP appointed judges (at least one by TFG) ruled that there’s long established legal precedent (100+ years) to require students to be vaccinated in order to attend a state college. So that’s cool.
I think that’s what gets me, LisforLeslie. The living with yourself.
My brother is visiting right now. We haven’t seen him for 18 months. We are at a cottage my famili (sister/BIL/niece/nephew; bro; my fiance; my parents) rented right now and it’s so nice. It’s the first time I’ve really hugged my mom. I only stopped wearing a mask with my family last week. I don’t want to let this go.
At least in Ontario there are still mask mandates. The return to school plan released today is basically useless.
Wendy (and I hope that I am not overstepping here) did you ever have your kids antibody tested? If you and your husband were both sick last spring there’s a decent chance that your kids may have caught it then. Kids often don’t have symptoms. It may be useful information to have as you assess risks going into the school year.
Not overstepping! Drew and I were both tested last year for antibodies and tested negative. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have covid – I do know of ppl who tested positive for covid but not for antibodies later on – but we decided not to test the kids. I wish we had. I think it’s too late now, but may do it anyway.
