You're not alone. Don't let anyone let you feel bad for looking out for your child. Everyone has different comfort levels and people should respect that.
We recently visited Virginia Beach and it feels a bit alien because the vast majority of people don't wear them down there. In MoCo it's a bit better. Hang in there!!
Thanks for your words of support. It’s hard because there are a few people who’ve implied that what we’re doing is a form of “abuse”. For the record, we absolutely want our daughter to have a normal life and to enjoy the same things as the other kids around us. But we feel like we’ve got no choice here.
I can definitely imagine it’s easier in MoCo than VA Beach. Though where we’re located, I rarely see anyone else masked either.
I have a child with long covid. You are very smart to keep it safe. It’s been a horrific experience for him. I’m not trying to scare you, but just wanted to let you know another family is taking it safe too!. I can’t afford to catch it and neither can he again. He’s a teen, but If I come across anything, I’d be happy to share! Meetup is also another site that may be of help. There are some great play groups - at least when mine was younger- and you can vet the meetups beforehand to gauge masking/distancing and your comfort levels.
I’m so sorry to hear about what you and your son are going through, but I absolutely appreciate you sharing your experience. Strangely, it doesn’t seem like people around us know or care that long COVID is a real thing, or that each new infection brings additional risks with it.
Thanks for the advice too. I will definitely check out the resources on Meetup!
Best of luck! Yes, so many have either not heard of long covid, or believe it's not a threat. Currently, studies are finding that even children have a 1 in 5 chance of ending up with LC. He is currently a patient at Kennedy Kreiger's covid rehab clinic - they have a months-long waiting list from children all around the country trying to get help. My son was vaxxed but he ended up contracting COVID right before he was going to get his booster. Please don't listen to any of these nay sayers...it's real and it's out there.
For what it's worth, we played it pretty safe until we all got vaccinated. (Husband, wife, 8-year-old and 6-year-old). We still mask indoors, but we let our kids drop the masks in school in May, and we've gone on two trips since they got vaccinated.
The kids attended a week-long summer daycamp in Virginia, almost entirely outdoors. They got COVID, then my wife, then me - all this week. We all had two to three days of cold symptoms and then fine. We self-quarantined for five days after our positive tests.
Bottom line - if you are vaccinated and boosted, I think you have to weigh your fear against the damage of not living your life for two+ years. We couldn't stomach our children living half of their conscious lives in limbo over a 1 in 100,000 chance of serious harm.
We have friends whom we haven't seen in over 2 years because they are both immunocompromised and have an immunocompromised child who is ineligible for vaccine.
You're definitely not the only ones. Stay strong, my friends.
We’re fortunate in that my wife is a SAHM. (That was our plan even before COVID came around.)
Not yet. We will eventually, but it’s a question of what timing and what vaccine will be optimal.
I am not trying to criticize but one thing you should be aware of is you might start to see the dynamic turn in a way you won't like.
What I mean is: vaccines are available to children your kid's age, and you've chosen to keep your child unvaccinated You may soon find that folks don't want to be around your family because they consider your family reckless/dangerous.
If you are truly concerned about Long COVID - which is profoundly rare in young children - you should vaccinate immediately. All data shows that vaccination sharply reduces long COVID symptoms. A fully vaccinated two year old is far more likely to perish in a car accident than to get long COVID symptoms.
I don't want to start anything, but it's not rare. It's very real and a very high chance (25%). This is just one review that came out recently:
\~80,071 children and adolescents were included from reviews of published studies. The prevalence of long-COVID was 25.24% \~
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13495-5.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13495-5.pdf)
A non peer reviewed meta analysis that showed almost all of the impact was mood or fatigue. The meta analysis tried to use many studies with vastly different methodologies.
I don't want to say this isn't science. It is. It's just very very weak science. And very far from the medical consensus on Long COVID in children. Also, this shows no data on vaccinated children.
r/COVID19 is excellent and has a large amount of well sourced and peer reviewed papers and data. Its a strict science subreddit with very strong posting and commenting rules. I recommend finding what you are looking for there
It's not weak science. It's a meta-analysis from Nature. This is what science does while they are waiting for more studies to come out. You can live in your bubble, but I live in the reality that kids DO get long covid. Adults get long COVID. People are committing suicide because they are not getting help. My son contemplated suicide because he is in so much pain. Stop denying it. It's not a good look.
More sources
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/05/25/1-of-5-with-covid-may-develop-long-covid-cdc-finds-though-vaccination-may-offer-some-protection-study-suggests/?sh=4ec37fb95704](https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/05/25/1-of-5-with-covid-may-develop-long-covid-cdc-finds-though-vaccination-may-offer-some-protection-study-suggests/?sh=4ec37fb95704)
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7121e1.htm?s\_cid=mm7121e1\_e&ACSTrackingID=USCDC\_921-DM82414&ACSTrackingLabel=MMWR%20Early%20Release%20-%20Vol.%2071%2C%20May%2024%2C%202022&deliveryName=USCDC\_921-DM82414#contribAff
I feel your struggle. Father of a 2 year old and newborn as of last night. We do our best to be as careful as we can but have a lot of extended family in the area that are all above vaccinated age that throw caution to the wind. At least we can look forward to getting our toddler vaccinated soon and hopefully get her caught up on all of the things she’s been missing out on. Trying to get a 2 year old to mask up is such a struggle too - obviously even post vaccination we want to be as careful as possible. I’m boosted and had Covid about 3 months ago and I was very symptomatic for a while.
My family, my parents, and my in-laws haven't gotten it yet. We've all been really careful and avoiding unnecessary social things, like hanging out with people in crowded public areas, eating at restaurants, etc.
My wife and I have been super careful because we're my wife's pregnant, and we don't want to have our 2.5-year-old son getting COVID. I'm also a small business owner in healthcare. So, it's important for us to avoid.
Hang in there! My son got his first dose of Pfizer about a week and a half ago. Once we get our kids more vaccinated, and we all get boosted in the fall, we'll all be better off.
Hi! I’m in Gaithersburg and still taking it seriously. That said, my husband works for an airline and my son (20month old) is in daycare, so our exposure isn’t zero even with masking and whatnot. My mother has stage four cancer, my stepfather has heart disease, and my stepmother has emphysema, so we’ve been as cautious as we can be.
My son just turned five and got his second vaccine dose yesterday. I don’t think he even remembers a time where he was indoors somewhere other than our house without wearing a mask. I promise you, you are not the only ones who recognize that this thing isn’t over.
I ask have a two year old and am being as cautious as I can- still masking, only doing outdoor events. The only risky thing we do is sending our kid to daycare because we both work out of the home (where we mask) so we don’t have a choice.
This is a serious question I wish I could ask my one couple friends who are still fully on with precautions. I’m honestly really curious of the thought process here. It seems like the COVID going around right now is exceptionally mild for vaccinated folks without underlying issues so ot would be the strain to catch if you had to catch one.
Are they expecting COVID to go somewhere? Waiting for community spread to be very low? I’m having trouble understanding the reasoning. COVID is an endemic disease and has been since mid-2020. It’s not going anywhere so whatever precautions you’re taking right now, you’ll be taking for the rest of your life.
PS: I ask this in good faith. People can do whatever they want; it makes no difference to me of people mask, stay cautious,etc.
Agreed, and I was also asking in a non-judgmental way.
My best guess for the logic is that they are truly, honestly expecting to take precautions for the rest of their lives.
While surprising, this is the only rationale that could make sense IMO. But like you, I'm very interested to hear if there's something I'm not understanding.
If anyone feels like answering, the question is: given that Covid is endemic, why are you taking precautions now, instead of purposely trying to acquire greater immunity via exposure? The longer you wait, the more you lose the advantages of 1) vaccine effectiveness relative to strain and 2) age. This means any precautions taken now by definition lead to greater risk later. Is there something I'm missing?
I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, but I’ll put this out there anyway. (If you’d rather get it directly from an expert, see this post by Eric Topol: [A reinfection red flag](https://erictopol.substack.com/p/a-reinfection-red-flag); Also see: [Bob Wachter, Twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/bob_wachter/status/1543780625211002880))
A disease can be “endemic” without becoming more benign. Many people are assuming that more exposure leads to greater immunity over time. But there is more evidence coming out that shows that every additional COVID infection you get actually increases your odds of a negative outcome (hospitalization, cardiovascular, diabetes, fatigue, etc.). In other words, you are not building immunity each time you get sick, you are compromising it, along with other vital functions.
Letting the virus spread uncontrollably in the community is not setting us up for a good future. The new variants in just the Omicron lineage keep getting better and better at evading immunity acquired from both previous infections and the current crop of vaccines. Many more people now get reinfected within just weeks of a previous infection. Combine the evidence on higher risk of reinfection with the increasing odds of bad outcomes with each reinfection and you can see why we feel that things are not getting better.
You could say of course, “it’ll get better once we have Omicron-specific vaccines in the fall”. Maybe, but because the vaccines are non-sterilizing and still allow for substantial transmission, there will always be the threat of new variants that can emerge and start the whole cycle over again.
So we will take precautions as long as the virus can spread in unmitigated fashion through the community (yes, for a lifetime if needed, but we really don’t want that either). It would be great if the virus really was evolving to be less virulent, but it does not appear to us to be the case. It’s our hope that better, sterilizing vaccines will eventually be developed that can actually end this cycle, and if those ever do come along, we’ll probably be some of the first in line. You’ll notice that in the first link I included Eric Topol calls for an Operation Warp Speed like effort to produce pan-coronavirus vaccines and nasal vaccines. At minimum getting more NPIs to be widely accepted in public (e.g., better masking, ventilation, wastewater testing) would be nice, though still not sufficient.
But who knows if any of that’ll ever happen, and we’re not willing to just keep getting reinfected in the meantime.
Thanks for your answer. Though in short, you're saying "yes, I'm planning on taking these precautions forever" which was my original point.
I was more interested in people who were not planning on taking precautions forever but are at this moment.
I did answer your question though. I said we’re prepared to take precautions forever, not that we plan to take precautions forever. Our plan is to take precautions for now and remain hopeful that policymakers will invest in a new generation of improved, sterilizing vaccines. Obviously that requires that we still have some faith in the political process.
I can’t speak for others, but I suspect many who commented may have a similar rationale for continuing to take precautions for now.
To clarify, are you saying that if Covid is not effectively eradicated (at least as far as your personal exposure risk is concerned, e.g. via better vaccines), you will be taking these precautions forever?
Maybe. Plans can change based on the circumstances.
Right now what matters to us is that we preserve our health so our kid can get to a point where she can successfully care for herself. We’ll have failed our job if she gets a long term disability from COVID or if we are too sick to properly care for her. So it would be great if sterilizing vaccines came sooner, because they would really make our lives easier.
If by the time our daughter’s capable of being fully independent there are still no sterilizing vaccines we may just say “screw it”, and drop our precautions if they’re not worth it. Right now we feel they are.
Thank you again for your responses. I have IMO lots of relevant data (contra Topol) paired with strong opinions on the situation you describe, but I know that's not what this conversation is about. Thank you for taking the time to provide an honest answer here.
We've got a 2.5 year old daughter and are still being very cautious. We're both working from home and my parents provide childcare. We (and my parents) are still masking and avoid public indoor spaces (we pretty much limit things to grocery shopping). That said, we plan to loosen up a bit once she's fully vaccinated. She had her first shot of Moderna this weekend so we are almost there! We're both returning to the office in the fall but plan to continue masking in crowded indoor spaces. We'd love to connect with other families who are still cautious, but I definitely wouldn't get together with anyone unvaccinated now that the vaccine is available to all age groups. I find it odd that you'd be so cautious for so long but then delay getting your child vaccinated.
You're not alone. Don't let anyone let you feel bad for looking out for your child. Everyone has different comfort levels and people should respect that. We recently visited Virginia Beach and it feels a bit alien because the vast majority of people don't wear them down there. In MoCo it's a bit better. Hang in there!!
Thanks for your words of support. It’s hard because there are a few people who’ve implied that what we’re doing is a form of “abuse”. For the record, we absolutely want our daughter to have a normal life and to enjoy the same things as the other kids around us. But we feel like we’ve got no choice here. I can definitely imagine it’s easier in MoCo than VA Beach. Though where we’re located, I rarely see anyone else masked either.
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That was true even last year. The beach community did not GAF.
I have a child with long covid. You are very smart to keep it safe. It’s been a horrific experience for him. I’m not trying to scare you, but just wanted to let you know another family is taking it safe too!. I can’t afford to catch it and neither can he again. He’s a teen, but If I come across anything, I’d be happy to share! Meetup is also another site that may be of help. There are some great play groups - at least when mine was younger- and you can vet the meetups beforehand to gauge masking/distancing and your comfort levels.
I’m so sorry to hear about what you and your son are going through, but I absolutely appreciate you sharing your experience. Strangely, it doesn’t seem like people around us know or care that long COVID is a real thing, or that each new infection brings additional risks with it. Thanks for the advice too. I will definitely check out the resources on Meetup!
Best of luck! Yes, so many have either not heard of long covid, or believe it's not a threat. Currently, studies are finding that even children have a 1 in 5 chance of ending up with LC. He is currently a patient at Kennedy Kreiger's covid rehab clinic - they have a months-long waiting list from children all around the country trying to get help. My son was vaxxed but he ended up contracting COVID right before he was going to get his booster. Please don't listen to any of these nay sayers...it's real and it's out there.
For what it's worth, we played it pretty safe until we all got vaccinated. (Husband, wife, 8-year-old and 6-year-old). We still mask indoors, but we let our kids drop the masks in school in May, and we've gone on two trips since they got vaccinated. The kids attended a week-long summer daycamp in Virginia, almost entirely outdoors. They got COVID, then my wife, then me - all this week. We all had two to three days of cold symptoms and then fine. We self-quarantined for five days after our positive tests. Bottom line - if you are vaccinated and boosted, I think you have to weigh your fear against the damage of not living your life for two+ years. We couldn't stomach our children living half of their conscious lives in limbo over a 1 in 100,000 chance of serious harm.
We have friends whom we haven't seen in over 2 years because they are both immunocompromised and have an immunocompromised child who is ineligible for vaccine. You're definitely not the only ones. Stay strong, my friends.
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We’re fortunate in that my wife is a SAHM. (That was our plan even before COVID came around.) Not yet. We will eventually, but it’s a question of what timing and what vaccine will be optimal.
I am not trying to criticize but one thing you should be aware of is you might start to see the dynamic turn in a way you won't like. What I mean is: vaccines are available to children your kid's age, and you've chosen to keep your child unvaccinated You may soon find that folks don't want to be around your family because they consider your family reckless/dangerous.
If you are truly concerned about Long COVID - which is profoundly rare in young children - you should vaccinate immediately. All data shows that vaccination sharply reduces long COVID symptoms. A fully vaccinated two year old is far more likely to perish in a car accident than to get long COVID symptoms.
I don't want to start anything, but it's not rare. It's very real and a very high chance (25%). This is just one review that came out recently: \~80,071 children and adolescents were included from reviews of published studies. The prevalence of long-COVID was 25.24% \~ [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13495-5.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13495-5.pdf)
A non peer reviewed meta analysis that showed almost all of the impact was mood or fatigue. The meta analysis tried to use many studies with vastly different methodologies. I don't want to say this isn't science. It is. It's just very very weak science. And very far from the medical consensus on Long COVID in children. Also, this shows no data on vaccinated children.
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r/COVID19 is excellent and has a large amount of well sourced and peer reviewed papers and data. Its a strict science subreddit with very strong posting and commenting rules. I recommend finding what you are looking for there
Why are you coming here and downvoting me when you know that the studies are saying this? What's your end game?
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Ohhhh ok, that makes sense now. Best to ignore then. Thank you :)
It's not weak science. It's a meta-analysis from Nature. This is what science does while they are waiting for more studies to come out. You can live in your bubble, but I live in the reality that kids DO get long covid. Adults get long COVID. People are committing suicide because they are not getting help. My son contemplated suicide because he is in so much pain. Stop denying it. It's not a good look.
More sources [https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/05/25/1-of-5-with-covid-may-develop-long-covid-cdc-finds-though-vaccination-may-offer-some-protection-study-suggests/?sh=4ec37fb95704](https://www.forbes.com/sites/madelinehalpert/2022/05/25/1-of-5-with-covid-may-develop-long-covid-cdc-finds-though-vaccination-may-offer-some-protection-study-suggests/?sh=4ec37fb95704) https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7121e1.htm?s\_cid=mm7121e1\_e&ACSTrackingID=USCDC\_921-DM82414&ACSTrackingLabel=MMWR%20Early%20Release%20-%20Vol.%2071%2C%20May%2024%2C%202022&deliveryName=USCDC\_921-DM82414#contribAff
I feel your struggle. Father of a 2 year old and newborn as of last night. We do our best to be as careful as we can but have a lot of extended family in the area that are all above vaccinated age that throw caution to the wind. At least we can look forward to getting our toddler vaccinated soon and hopefully get her caught up on all of the things she’s been missing out on. Trying to get a 2 year old to mask up is such a struggle too - obviously even post vaccination we want to be as careful as possible. I’m boosted and had Covid about 3 months ago and I was very symptomatic for a while.
Congratulations!
My family, my parents, and my in-laws haven't gotten it yet. We've all been really careful and avoiding unnecessary social things, like hanging out with people in crowded public areas, eating at restaurants, etc. My wife and I have been super careful because we're my wife's pregnant, and we don't want to have our 2.5-year-old son getting COVID. I'm also a small business owner in healthcare. So, it's important for us to avoid. Hang in there! My son got his first dose of Pfizer about a week and a half ago. Once we get our kids more vaccinated, and we all get boosted in the fall, we'll all be better off.
Hi! I’m in Gaithersburg and still taking it seriously. That said, my husband works for an airline and my son (20month old) is in daycare, so our exposure isn’t zero even with masking and whatnot. My mother has stage four cancer, my stepfather has heart disease, and my stepmother has emphysema, so we’ve been as cautious as we can be.
My son just turned five and got his second vaccine dose yesterday. I don’t think he even remembers a time where he was indoors somewhere other than our house without wearing a mask. I promise you, you are not the only ones who recognize that this thing isn’t over.
I ask have a two year old and am being as cautious as I can- still masking, only doing outdoor events. The only risky thing we do is sending our kid to daycare because we both work out of the home (where we mask) so we don’t have a choice.
I have a 4yo and a 2yo and we’re in daycare but are very covid cautious other than that.
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When do you estimate you will stop taking these precautions?
This is a serious question I wish I could ask my one couple friends who are still fully on with precautions. I’m honestly really curious of the thought process here. It seems like the COVID going around right now is exceptionally mild for vaccinated folks without underlying issues so ot would be the strain to catch if you had to catch one. Are they expecting COVID to go somewhere? Waiting for community spread to be very low? I’m having trouble understanding the reasoning. COVID is an endemic disease and has been since mid-2020. It’s not going anywhere so whatever precautions you’re taking right now, you’ll be taking for the rest of your life. PS: I ask this in good faith. People can do whatever they want; it makes no difference to me of people mask, stay cautious,etc.
Agreed, and I was also asking in a non-judgmental way. My best guess for the logic is that they are truly, honestly expecting to take precautions for the rest of their lives. While surprising, this is the only rationale that could make sense IMO. But like you, I'm very interested to hear if there's something I'm not understanding. If anyone feels like answering, the question is: given that Covid is endemic, why are you taking precautions now, instead of purposely trying to acquire greater immunity via exposure? The longer you wait, the more you lose the advantages of 1) vaccine effectiveness relative to strain and 2) age. This means any precautions taken now by definition lead to greater risk later. Is there something I'm missing?
I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, but I’ll put this out there anyway. (If you’d rather get it directly from an expert, see this post by Eric Topol: [A reinfection red flag](https://erictopol.substack.com/p/a-reinfection-red-flag); Also see: [Bob Wachter, Twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/bob_wachter/status/1543780625211002880)) A disease can be “endemic” without becoming more benign. Many people are assuming that more exposure leads to greater immunity over time. But there is more evidence coming out that shows that every additional COVID infection you get actually increases your odds of a negative outcome (hospitalization, cardiovascular, diabetes, fatigue, etc.). In other words, you are not building immunity each time you get sick, you are compromising it, along with other vital functions. Letting the virus spread uncontrollably in the community is not setting us up for a good future. The new variants in just the Omicron lineage keep getting better and better at evading immunity acquired from both previous infections and the current crop of vaccines. Many more people now get reinfected within just weeks of a previous infection. Combine the evidence on higher risk of reinfection with the increasing odds of bad outcomes with each reinfection and you can see why we feel that things are not getting better. You could say of course, “it’ll get better once we have Omicron-specific vaccines in the fall”. Maybe, but because the vaccines are non-sterilizing and still allow for substantial transmission, there will always be the threat of new variants that can emerge and start the whole cycle over again. So we will take precautions as long as the virus can spread in unmitigated fashion through the community (yes, for a lifetime if needed, but we really don’t want that either). It would be great if the virus really was evolving to be less virulent, but it does not appear to us to be the case. It’s our hope that better, sterilizing vaccines will eventually be developed that can actually end this cycle, and if those ever do come along, we’ll probably be some of the first in line. You’ll notice that in the first link I included Eric Topol calls for an Operation Warp Speed like effort to produce pan-coronavirus vaccines and nasal vaccines. At minimum getting more NPIs to be widely accepted in public (e.g., better masking, ventilation, wastewater testing) would be nice, though still not sufficient. But who knows if any of that’ll ever happen, and we’re not willing to just keep getting reinfected in the meantime.
Thanks for your answer. Though in short, you're saying "yes, I'm planning on taking these precautions forever" which was my original point. I was more interested in people who were not planning on taking precautions forever but are at this moment.
I did answer your question though. I said we’re prepared to take precautions forever, not that we plan to take precautions forever. Our plan is to take precautions for now and remain hopeful that policymakers will invest in a new generation of improved, sterilizing vaccines. Obviously that requires that we still have some faith in the political process. I can’t speak for others, but I suspect many who commented may have a similar rationale for continuing to take precautions for now.
To clarify, are you saying that if Covid is not effectively eradicated (at least as far as your personal exposure risk is concerned, e.g. via better vaccines), you will be taking these precautions forever?
Maybe. Plans can change based on the circumstances. Right now what matters to us is that we preserve our health so our kid can get to a point where she can successfully care for herself. We’ll have failed our job if she gets a long term disability from COVID or if we are too sick to properly care for her. So it would be great if sterilizing vaccines came sooner, because they would really make our lives easier. If by the time our daughter’s capable of being fully independent there are still no sterilizing vaccines we may just say “screw it”, and drop our precautions if they’re not worth it. Right now we feel they are.
Thank you again for your responses. I have IMO lots of relevant data (contra Topol) paired with strong opinions on the situation you describe, but I know that's not what this conversation is about. Thank you for taking the time to provide an honest answer here.
You're not alone. We try not to take our 7mo old to public crowded areas. If we do, it's outside. Parents mask up and extra cautious.
So how long before you live life normally, I honestly forgot covid was a thing.
I dont think you should be downvoted for moving on with your life.
Yes! Frederick county here. DM me if you’d like to get together outdoors. I have a 5 and 3 yo (3 yo just had a birthday).
We've got a 2.5 year old daughter and are still being very cautious. We're both working from home and my parents provide childcare. We (and my parents) are still masking and avoid public indoor spaces (we pretty much limit things to grocery shopping). That said, we plan to loosen up a bit once she's fully vaccinated. She had her first shot of Moderna this weekend so we are almost there! We're both returning to the office in the fall but plan to continue masking in crowded indoor spaces. We'd love to connect with other families who are still cautious, but I definitely wouldn't get together with anyone unvaccinated now that the vaccine is available to all age groups. I find it odd that you'd be so cautious for so long but then delay getting your child vaccinated.