Current COVID guidelines for young children

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

At this point, 3/4 of our family are vaccinated (or will be max-vax by Wednesday). Most indoor places in our town are mask-free. But we have an 8-year-old, who obviously can’t get vaccinated yet. And it’s hard as hell to find fact-based guidelines for risk assessment at this point. (CDC websites for parent guidelines say things like “Updated September 2020” or “Updated November 2020,” which isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring).

Given the Delta variant, we have questions, such as, what are the risks of:
-Outside play dates with unvaccinated kids?
-Being indoors and unmasked with vaccinated family members from different households?
-Taking a kid to an outdoor festival?
-Indoor masked play dates with an unvaccinated kid?
-Indoor, unmasked play date with a single unvaccinated kid?

How can we assess these risks indexed to our local COVID numbers? I can put these things on a rough spectrum from safest to riskiest (which, when listing them, I tried to do), but I don’t know at what point the risk becomes greater than, say, the risk of a 4-hour trip on 1-40, which is something we feel reasonably safe doing.

Does anyone have a good, data-based source of guidelines for parents of young children?

[eschrodinger]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Does anyone have a good, data-based source of guidelines for parents of young children?

No, I don’t, but I have all of these same questions.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

This article is helpful.

The best assumption seems to be that Delta will be modestly worse for children than earlier versions of the virus. “I haven’t seen data to make me particularly worried about Delta in kids,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told me.
…
Death is not the only outcome that parents fear, of course. Yet “long Covid” and hospitalization have also been very rare in children. It’s just that society has been so focused on Covid that we have paid intense attention to the risks associated with it — even when they are smaller than other risks that we unthinkingly accept.

To take one example, we don’t use the phrase “long flu,” but it’s a real problem, including for children: One academic study has found that up to 10 percent of people who contract influenza later develop cardiac inflammation.
…

• Polls suggest that many Democratic voters have an inflated sense of Covid’s risks to children. If you’re liberal, you may want to ask yourself if you fall into this category. (If you’re conservative, you may want to encourage more of your friends to get vaccinated.)
• The biggest risk to your child’s health today almost certainly is not Covid. It’s more likely to be an activity that you have long decided is acceptable — like swimming, riding a bicycle or traveling in a car.

There’s a graph that shows (I think) that for kids ages 5-14, the risk of death in a vehicular accident is almost 10 times greater than the risk of death by COVID.

I find this reassuring.

[bump]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

The biggest risk to your child’s health today almost certainly is not Covid. It’s more likely to be an activity that you have long decided is acceptable — like swimming, riding a bicycle or traveling in a car.

That’s the problem though; there’s nothing published that puts this in perspective, just vague stuff like this that is not overly helpful. It doesn’t answer in any way the questions that you (and I) have, just says that it’s not much of a risk.

I wish they’d just come out and say what the risks are, what the likelihoods of things happening are, and what rational people should probably do and/or let their kids do, and how they should do them. Clear-cut stuff like “Children under 12 can have play dates indoors as long as they’re masked” or “COVID isn’t a big risk for kids under 12, so unmasked play dates are fine as long as the parents are vacccinated.” Stuff like that would be much more helpful than “It’s likely that riding their bike is more likely to kill them than COVID” .

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@bump

That’s the problem though; there’s nothing published that puts this in perspective, just vague stuff like this that is not overly helpful. It doesn’t answer in any way the questions that you (and I) have, just says that it’s not much of a risk.

The full article has a table showing risks.

[bump]

I apparently reached my limit of free articles, and I don’t have a NY Times subscription.

And that’s half of my point; this sort of thing shouldn’t be exclusive content for one newspaper; it should be on the CDC website, state/county/city health department pages, most major news outlets, and so on.