SF Bay Area Parents: What are you doing to protect your <= 2yo child from COVID-19?
How are parents/guardians in the SF Bay Area managing their <= 2 year olds, when vaccines are not yet approved and where masking is not a safe option (due to inability to communicate if breathing is a problem)? With Omicron on the rise and lots of people I personally know with breakthrough infections, we are trying to weigh the pros/cons of returning to normal life while not being negligent about the rise in COVID infections, particularly hospitalizations of kids. TC: 420K #covid-19
You don't need to do anything to protect kids, arguably you don't want them exposed so you or another person doesn't get it but they aren't at risk from COVID.
omicron is causing problems for very young children, so young kids are at some risk. "There's a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we've gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder strain of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that's good for most Americans," Gottlieb said on "Face the Nation." "The one group that may be a problem is very young kids, very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you're in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-omicron-variant-milder-strain-danger-gottlieb-face-the-nation/ And there has been an uptick in hospitalizations for young children for upper respiratory infections https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna11170
Yes I am aware - it doesn’t bother me and lots of doctors have ties to pharma. I like that he is willing to pivot his stance based on the data - he was on the board of an e-cig company because he thought e-cigs could help people quit smoking, but when he saw that teens were getting hooked on vaping, he took a lot of actions as fda commissioner against tobacco and e-cig companies. He’s not overly alarmist, so when he talks about the risk to young children, I take him seriously. He is the only trump administration official I liked. But, I am not here to persuade you to change your opinion on him— the bottom line, which a number of doctors have highlighted and the data has shown, is that omicron is a risk to young children because it tends to infect the upper respiratory systems.
Read above about the upper respiratory infections in young children. I also rely on doctors for medical advice, not blind—- My older kid is vaccinated and my kid under 5 will be vaccinated as soon as it’s available.
Being cautious but trusting science and statistics.
Keep them away from vaxxed. Specially from triple jabbed. They all are super spreaders and are mainly responsible for 100 thousand kids hospitalized and are in ICU, many on ventilators. If you yourself are vaxxed, send them to any unvaxxed family you know.
Let them live their lives. Kids aren’t really affected by covid. The impact of not socializing them with other kids, play at parks and let them be kids is much larger than the impact of covid. And pls, take their masks off, they need fresh air.
Gotta quarantine yourself these times during Omicron spike. In a month from nownit will be business as usual