The things that scare me about kids as a vector during this pandemic are people letting their guard down more with kids and kids having more points of contact during a day. I don't get within 6 feet of anyone I can avoid. If I'm in public I only touch something if I think I'm buying it and take extra precautions with things like surfaces and hygiene. The elderly are still going to hug their grandkids when they watch them while their parents work. The parents are still going to sit in a car with recirculating air for hours every week with that kid and interact with them much more closely than I do practically anyone. When I worked emergency the #1 paediatric complaint we sent away was hand-foot-and-mouth disease because children are disgusting little monsters who love chewing on themselves and then touching things. At the grocery they're still acting normally and normal for them is licking their fingers while touching everything they see. Half the parents don't even mask them up- our minimum mandatory age is 10- and when they do the kids don't wear it properly or make any attempt to socially distance.
I have a 5 year old and an almost 3 year old and we make them both wear masks when we go anywhere and we get weird looks. Hardly anyone masks up their kids it's insane
In my suburb they're feral. Even during the early days of the mandatory lockdown when we were trying to keep it limited to a handful of counties, they were all outside doing normal kid stuff with kids from all of the other houses in an area that connects populations between two states and multiple rural areas. It was when I stopped having any faith in there being a coherent response to this. In public I've seen parents wearing masks and gloves while their three mask-less kids jump on anything they see like plague fleas before running back to grab each other and their parents.
Epidemiology/virology have always been super interesting to me and so I watched all the pandemic films before this ever happened. Not one of those films portrayed it as so goddamn stupid that you have to be morally agnostic toward it to stay sane. I can focus on society collapsing because people are spitting into each others' mouths because like 30% of them reject germ theory or I can focus on bad people catching it. There was never that film where the protagonist wants to scream at an old person for thinking basic hygiene is a Jewish conspiracy.
My county already has multiple outbreaks at middle schools where the kids fill the hallways without masks and crowd together at recess. All the variations of their individual viruses, of their classroom's virus ecosystem, of the building's, and of every home/business they visit just mixing together. Maybe their parents work at the nearby meatpacking plant that had a major outbreak they covered up. They could of course be nurses, one of those middle class professions that still allows home ownership in that area. Maybe they're just renting because their parents are essential workers in any number of fields with close contact being impossible or culturally discouraged.
On the other hand, if we all stayed home for a whole month then I couldn't go to Applebees and make a poor person risk dying to serve me bad food. Gotta break a million eggs or more to make an omelette.
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The things that scare me about kids as a vector during this pandemic are people letting their guard down more with kids and kids having more points of contact during a day. I don't get within 6 feet of anyone I can avoid. If I'm in public I only touch something if I think I'm buying it and take extra precautions with things like surfaces and hygiene. The elderly are still going to hug their grandkids when they watch them while their parents work. The parents are still going to sit in a car with recirculating air for hours every week with that kid and interact with them much more closely than I do practically anyone. When I worked emergency the #1 paediatric complaint we sent away was hand-foot-and-mouth disease because children are disgusting little monsters who love chewing on themselves and then touching things. At the grocery they're still acting normally and normal for them is licking their fingers while touching everything they see. Half the parents don't even mask them up- our minimum mandatory age is 10- and when they do the kids don't wear it properly or make any attempt to socially distance.
I have a 5 year old and an almost 3 year old and we make them both wear masks when we go anywhere and we get weird looks. Hardly anyone masks up their kids it's insane
In my suburb they're feral. Even during the early days of the mandatory lockdown when we were trying to keep it limited to a handful of counties, they were all outside doing normal kid stuff with kids from all of the other houses in an area that connects populations between two states and multiple rural areas. It was when I stopped having any faith in there being a coherent response to this. In public I've seen parents wearing masks and gloves while their three mask-less kids jump on anything they see like plague fleas before running back to grab each other and their parents.
Epidemiology/virology have always been super interesting to me and so I watched all the pandemic films before this ever happened. Not one of those films portrayed it as so goddamn stupid that you have to be morally agnostic toward it to stay sane. I can focus on society collapsing because people are spitting into each others' mouths because like 30% of them reject germ theory or I can focus on bad people catching it. There was never that film where the protagonist wants to scream at an old person for thinking basic hygiene is a Jewish conspiracy.
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My county already has multiple outbreaks at middle schools where the kids fill the hallways without masks and crowd together at recess. All the variations of their individual viruses, of their classroom's virus ecosystem, of the building's, and of every home/business they visit just mixing together. Maybe their parents work at the nearby meatpacking plant that had a major outbreak they covered up. They could of course be nurses, one of those middle class professions that still allows home ownership in that area. Maybe they're just renting because their parents are essential workers in any number of fields with close contact being impossible or culturally discouraged.
On the other hand, if we all stayed home for a whole month then I couldn't go to Applebees and make a poor person risk dying to serve me bad food. Gotta break a million eggs or more to make an omelette.