Our pediatrician has told us that the risk to a child is the same as a vaccinated adult. My 4 year old wears a mask indoors, including school, my not quite 2 year old does not. We don’t wear them outdoors at the playground, even when there are other kids.
I just wish more people would get vaccinated. The anti vax propoganda is insane.
The thing is… all those diseases we already live with have a lot of long term risks too, it’s just that they’re pretty low odds, they’re hidden from our awareness, and when we are aware we’re more accepting of the risk because we’re used to it. Odds are covid is very much in the same vein there. That might not help but, there we are 
But also most schools have actually been doing a really good job. And in addition to less severe cases, kids (not teens though) don’t seem to transmit it nearly as much- when they do get sick it’s with a much lower viral load than adults have.
Thank you both. It really helped me. I don’t know where this overwhelming anxiety suddenly came from.
Waves hands at the broader world I’m honestly more confused by people who ARENT having giant waves of anxiety right now.
Thank you, thank you. Just a heads up that I will be panic posting this same question maybe twice before September because I’ll have forgotten we talked about it.
THANKS OMD FRIENDZ
An excerpt from today’s NYT email:
Fortunately, the available evidence indicatesthat schools can safely return to normal hours in the fall. Nearly all teachers have already had the chance to be vaccinated. By August, all children who are at least 12 are also likely to have had the opportunity. (The Pfizer vaccine is now available to people 16 and up, and federal regulators appear set to approve it for 12- to 15-year-olds in coming weeks.)
Few younger children — maybe none — will have been vaccinated by the fall. But data from both the U.S. and other countries suggests that children rarely infect each other at school. One reason is that Covid-19 tends to be mild for younger children, making them less likely to be symptomatic and contagious.
Even more important, this coronavirus rarely harms children. For them, the death rate resembles that of a normal flu, and other symptoms, like “long Covid,” are extremely rare. Covid presents the sort of small health risk to children that society has long accepted without closing schools. A child who’s driven to school almost certainly faces a bigger risk from that car trip than from the virus.
Of course, the risk from Covid is not zero, which is why many school districts are still grappling with what to do in the fall. Covid has so thoroughly dominated our thinking over the past 14 months that many people continue to focus on Covid-related issues — even highly unusual or uncommon ones — to the exclusion of everything else.
Covid does present a minuscule risk to children. And there will also be some teachers and other school employees who choose not to be vaccinated or who cannot receive a vaccine shot for health reasons; some of them may need to remain home if schools reopen.
For these reasons, a full reopening of schools will bring real, if small, costs and complications. Communities will have to weigh those costs against the enormous damage that closed schools are doing to American women.
Gurl. Damn.
Lol right? Here’s the first part:
Good morning. We look at how the lack of normal schooling is hurting mothers.
Parents and children at a protest calling for schools to reopen in Jersey City last month.Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
With the U.S. economy growing rapidly, millions of people have returned to work. Yet there is still one large group of Americans whose employment rates remain far below their prepandemic levels — mothers of young children.
Consider this data, which Moody’s Analytics compiled for The Morning:
Source: Moody’s Analytics
The explanation is obvious enough. Many schools and day care centers have not returned to normal operations. They are open for only a few hours a day, a few days a week or on alternating weeks, making it difficult for parents to return to a full-time job. And parenting responsibilities still fall disproportionately on women.
This situation is unlikely to change over the final month or two of the current school year. But it raises a major question about the start of the next school year, in August and September: Will schools fully reopen — every day, Monday through Friday, and every week?
If they do not and instead maintain a hybrid approach, it will exact a heavy cost on American women. The biggest issue of gender equality in 2021 may well be whether schools return to near-normal this fall.
“Fully opening schools is the single most important thing,” my colleague Claire Cain Miller, who writes about gender and work, told me. “Obviously, parents can’t get back to work without that.”
“It’s not enough to sort of open,” said Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who studies parenting. “We are going to need to figure out how to make it possible to open normally.”
Me too. Except I would show as being a full time employee on that chart but I’m sure as hell not working 40 hours a week with a kindergartener underfoot, much less one that has three teletherapy sessions every week.
I literally just got doing doing a virtual IEP meeting with school and had to say we don’t know what our plans are for next fall yet. Thinking of the overall moving goalposts that the pandemic situation has been recently with vaccinations happening, masks are optional in schools here starting this summer. Sending him back when adults are somewhat vaccinated and kids are still required to wear masks is one thing, but sending him back when some kids are masking and others aren’t and maybe he doesn’t feel like keeping his on and his teacher can’t be everywhere at once … yeah. Not a great option.
Thank you for sharing these, though, I’m going to pass them along to Mr. Meer.
How the heck is it that men with young children have had less of a decline in employment than men without young children?
I’ve seen a lot of men promoted after having a kid who were barely average performers, so I wouldn’t be surprised there is still some bias in keeping “the providers” employed…
My guess was just plain demographics. Most of my kid’s graduating cohort had their job offers rescinded or were laid off. Most of my friends in established careers kept their jobs. There are more people in entry level or hourly wage jobs without kids and more people in salaried or long term career trajectory jobs with kids.
I’m not a demographer by any means (one of my friends is and it’s a fascinating job!) and I don’t often think of all the possibilities so take that conjecture with a massive heap of salt.
A little over 24 hours after pfizer #2 and I’m feeling slammed. Overdid it in the garden this morning. But I got 12 tomatoes/3*4 varieties and 7 cucumbers of two varieties planted, plus a bunch of marigold and nasturtium seeds and more arugula, and we fenced in that bed to try to keep the racoons out.
Now I’m gonna nap!
Wooo!
Haha, your slammed day is better than my regular days lately. 
Definitely take it easy to recover!
Dammit. Found out this morning that our vendor project team in India is all out with covid. Apparently the project lead was talking on the call about having a fever. I hope he was WFH and not in the office exposing people but IDK how common WFH is in India…
Note, I don’t GAF about this impeding our project, I am worried about their health.
From the president’s press conference today:
From the governor’s press conference yesterday:
What do we win? I’m sure we have passed 70% today…
(Apparently Maine is also at 50% so they may disagree who was first. 
)
I know, I am being cheeky, just a bit of fun. It really boggles my mind how differently things are going in different parts of the country… I’m glad my parents are coming here in June, and I don’t have to go down there.
(Also if you look at different websites they literally all show different numbers, which is amusing. I guess I should believe the state website as “most accurate”, though…)
I like the Washington Post’s vaccine tracker. Nice graphs and the data is easy to compare and drill down into. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/covid-vaccine-states-distribution-doses/
Some “highlights” about Florida…
Can I move to Connecticut please??
You are welcome here! But be forewarned, the taxes are high… But soon we my have recreational marijuana (both MA and NY already do…), and state health exchange is one of the oldest in the nation (similar to Massachusetts’).
We were part of the last surge… It was attributed to the NYC variant (the region is soooo interconnected). But cases are down like 45 percent from 2 weeks ago, and continuing to decline… I think we are at the level of last October now?
Our governor did rescind some of the restrictions on May 1, and is expected to rescind the remainder of the rest on May 19 except possibly the indoor mask mandate. So everything back to 100 percent capacity, bars open fully, no closing curfews. But currently they expect to have 70 percent of adults fully vaccinated by then… So it might be ok!
