The UK has stricter guidelines for vaccinated people, I suspect because they’re taking the variants seriously. I’m not sure the US is (yet), even though they’re here, too.
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Like the flu, COVID is not the kind of disease we can easily eradicate. With vaccinations it will become something that flares up in locales from time to time before becoming something in the background.
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The anti-vaxers, the stupid, the lazy, the Pro-Trump, the anti-liberal, the MaFeeDums, the Fox news watchers, etc, etc. There’s a lot of factions out their with their own reasons for not getting vaccinated. And until something they want to do REQUIRES a vaccination they won’t do it.
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My then 10 year old son had COVID in February '20 (confirmed by antibody test). I’m extremely concerned that he could get it again and the outcome will be a whole lot worse. I don’t want to put him in a school building until he’s able to get vaccinated. Too many parents of kids at his school have more money than brains and buy into the anti-vax BS.
@MerelyGifted: I got the Pfizer shot on the 7th and the injection site still feels bruised. I go back to Ford Field next Wednesday, and will have the second in the other arm.
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I know every child case with Covid is scary. I have two young daughters myself. I know the thought of them getting seriously ill is terrifying.
A child catching Covid at this point is a fairly common event. Tons of children have caught it. Current known child cases are over 3.6 million,1 and the actual number is probably several times that since the vast majority of cases are asymptomatic. There are 25 million children in the US, so currently way more than one in ten kids have caught it so far.
Child deaths from Covid is currently remarkably low: under 300 total.1 That’s fewer than 6 per state.
Obviously each death is a tragedy, but that’s so far below, say, the number of kids killed in car accidents each year (40002) that it would barely register on any list of causes of mortality.
The total number of hospitalizations is higher, of course, about 15,000.2 But to put that in perspective, this journal article3 estimated that about 2.4/1000 children were hospitalized for the flu in 2006 (not a heavy flu year), which translates to well over 50,000 flu hospitalizations across the US that year. And that given the fact that way, way more kids are catching Covid, and that most kids in the US are vaccinated against the flu!
And yes, we hear all sorts of horror stories of kids and Long Covid, but these are ones that make the news. I think back and I’ve heard, what, maybe 20 actual individual stories of child Long Covid (from the news, social media, etc), and my brain naturally translates this to kids across the country are suffering. But that’s a mental bias. Given that the number of deaths and hospitalizations are a tiny fraction of even the flu, there’s no evidence that Long Covid is likely to affect more than a tiny handful of kids.
Ok, but even given the tiny rates of death (6 per state total) and hospitalizations, shouldn’t we do everything to protect them? Well, this is where people will differ, and we have to accept that. Personally, I still took my kids on a two-hour car ride to visit their grandparents before the pandemic, even though the risk of them dying in a highway accident was non-zero (and much greater than the current risk of them dying of Covid). Why? Because the benefits of driving the kids somewhere was higher than the risks. Likewise I sent them to school before Covid even though the risks of them being hospitalized or dying of the flu was non-zero (and much greater than the current risk from Covid). Why? Because the benefits of going to school outweighed those risks.
So I totally get it if people come to a different conclusion. But to me, keeping them home has turned out to be about risk to others, not risk to them. Now that the risk to others is reduced, I’m going to let them be in schools, and hang out (mostly outdoors) with kids of other vaccinated parents. The risk to them is minimal compared with everything else they are at risk for, and the benefits are enormous.
- https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/ (Click the “Full Report” button to get the complete pdf)
- https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2018-12-19/car-crashes-guns-killed-the-most-us-children-and-teens-in-2016
- Estimating Influenza Hospitalizations among Children
Remember seeing that Michigan Hot Zone on national news about a week ago? Yeah, that’s where we live. I’m not coming at this from an irrational position, the risks here are demonstrably higher.
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Sure, and I wasn’t saying send your kid out now, wherever you are in the world.
I was simply pushing back on the assumption that young children need to be vaccinated before we’ll ever let them back into schools, or to see family members. For young children, that might be over a year away. I personally think that there are measurable, known harms to waiting that long before letting them socialize again, and that the risk to them from Covid is less than that of many other risks we exposed them to every day pre-pandemic.
But again, I understand that some families will want to keep their children extra-safe during that time, and that’s fine.
Mrs Mangochin and I got shot #2 this morning. Aside from pain in my arm from a needle going into my soft tender flesh, we’re both doing fine.
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I’m scheduled to get my first shot on Tuesday.
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I had to check with the guy to make sure he even gave me the shot, he was so good with the needle. The next day, though: “Yep. He sure as hell did.”
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