Good morning! Hello. How are you? Doing okay? Holding up? Getting tired of “this shit?”
Let’s talk about it today. “This shit.” The pandemic. Let’s talk about the current state of COVID. I haven’t been writing about COVID and the pandemic much. It’s mostly still a muddled mess in my head. I try and write down “how I’m feeling,” and… what else is there to say after seventeen months. But I still think about it every. single. day. It still dominates our life. I still feel constantly muddled about it, torn. My thinking evolves every day on the topic.
And, of course, every one of us is in a different situation. For us, having a young child is a huge part of our calculations, as kids Jane’s age can’t yet, of course, get vaccinated. But also, Jane’s age means other things. She’s too young for school, so we don’t really have a horse in the race regarding the great school debates. So far Jane is handling the pandemic very well emotionally and developmentally. We find it a bit sad she doesn’t have more friends, but she is none the wiser at this time.
Beyond our children, we all have to evaluate other factors: other family members. Our home. Our town. Our state. For us, we have a small extended family. My mother in law is with us. My mother is so far away that practically speaking she doesn’t enter into day-to-day considerations, but in the larger picture, I’ve managed to spend a good amount of time with her this year and that is not particularly pressing.
We live in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, with plenty of space both in and out. Out house is very comfortable. We want for nothing. We both have the privilege of being able to work from home indefinitely, on our own timeline. Our bosses are not pressuring us to hurry up and come into the office. We are, it should be said, very, very privileged about this pandemic. We have been the whole time. I recognize that.
I re-iterate that I am not trying to pass judgement on others. I’m just trying to lay out where my thinking is, for my family. Everyone is going to make their own decisions. If I didn’t have a kid, if I lived in a city, my actions would be completely different. My god. Completely. I would be drunk at an indoor rock show right now and it is seven AM. I’d find one.
But. As it is, this is the hand I’ve been dealt, good and bad.
So. Where are we with all this. First, in our state, things are getting worse. Case counts and the like are good measurements but to me I find the best measurement of the situation is hospitalization numbers. If you have been vaccinated, and you get COVID, but it’s mild and you were fine, that’s the vaccine doing its job. So I don’t think case counts are the way to go. But hospitalizations. No one wants to be hospitalized. Hospitalization is serious. And here is North Carolina’s hospitalization graph for the last two months:
That is crazy. The peak, at the worst of last winter’s wave, was just around 4,000, so we’re not there yet, but at this rate, which is still accellerating, we’ll be there by end of September. There were two 252 new cases in my county last week. Back in July, we were getting five or six new cases a week. This thing is taking off. And the hospitalizations show that it’s serious.
North Carolina, through the history of this pandemic has been exceptionally average. Middle of the road, all around. Amongst all Americans, 50.8% are fully vaccinated. It’s 51% here. Like elsewhere, the vast majority of all this is among the unvaccinated, but 8% of new cases in North Carolina are among the vaccinated.
This equates to 20 new cases in my county in the last week amongst the vaccinated. This is not actually correct, as there are geographic variations throughout the state, but our county is exceptionally average in these things. That’s… not nothing! That’s five times the number of weekly cases we were getting in June. That’s kind of crazy!
So. Then. Kids.
The first thing to be said about kids shouldn’t have to be said, but it absolutely needs to be said, because the right seems to have forgotten this: not only do we not want our kids to die, we would also like to keep them out of the hospital, and we would like to keep them from getting long-term symptoms that might effect them their entire lives.
It is completely insane to me that the same yahoos who are saying “but we don’t know the long-term effects of the vaccine!” aren’t saying the same thing about long-haul COVID in their kids. No, they’re just saying “COVID’s not going to kill your kid, you baby.”
I know COVID is not going to kill Jane. What I don’t know is what it will do to her.
Let’s start with the article in the New York Times yesterday. It is some scary shit. Some have pointed out that it is a bit suspect — my old friend Anya Kamenetz has a good thread about the studies behind the article and the stories in it being a mismatch, and I think Anya has some good points. When the Times article is throwing around numbers as high as ten percent of all childhood COVID cases having long-haul symptoms, those are, typically, mild symptons and nothing like the (very real) experiences of the kids depicted in the article. Nonetheless, those kids exist. And most of the doomsday speak in the article, I noticed, is coming from the doctors, whose knowledge and experience is very real, and not so much the journalists. Like Anya, I went and read the Nature article — one of the sources of data underneath the Times article — and, yeah. That is some scary shit.
But. Really. We don’t know yet. We just don’t know. The always amazing Emily Oster also weighed in yesterday with a very good essay talking about childhood COVID, long-haul, and parental decision making. It is a very good read.
As far as I can tell, the long and the short of it is this: about 4 million kids have gotten COVID in the US. Some percentage of them – somewhere between 1 and 10 percent, probably closer to 1 — have gotten moderate to severe long-haul covid. This translates to 40,000 to 400,000 kids. That… is not nothing!
And, of course, what are we to do with this other bit of news yesterday, of three thousand more kids getting COVID in Louisiana in less than a week. That’s sixty-ish long-haul covid cases in one week in one state. Louisiana is only 37% fully vaccinated, but that’s only 13% less than the average state. And in every state, no kids under 12 are vaccinated yet. I can rationalize this data, but, STILL.
Oster produces a very helpful chart that I think is very useful (She has a link to the underlying data):
So. Let’s think about this. The first thing to keep in mind on this chart is that they are both if your kid had the illness. So, we’re not talking about getting it, here. BUT, looking at this chart, there are a few things that stand out:
Your child is less likely to die from COVID than the flu, but not by much. About 170 kids died from COVID in 2020. More kids died from the flu in 2019, perhaps much more, but in the same ballpark.
Your child is waaaaay more likely to be hospitalized if they get COVID than if they get the flu.
630+ kids die in car crashes every year, and 97,000 are injured. So, the deaths are a lot more, but the injuries? Not actually that much more than long-haul COVID. Potentially far fewer. And, of course, let’s bear in mind: this is with us, as a society, doing everything we can to reduce those numbers, passing laws, requiring safety seats.
A few other things to keep in mind here:
It might be much worse than that. Oster seems to be averaging or something. Remember, some studies have the number much higher.
These are still apples-to-oranges comparisons. Kids get the flu shot (mostly. Whackjob parents and the immunocompromised excepted). Kids sit in car seats. What we’re comparing in that table are situations where we have robust societal protections in place (for flu and cats) to situations where many kids do not yet have those protections. Older kids can get vaccinated, obviously, but it looks like not many have, so overall, I’d say we’re looking at oh, imagonna say about a 10% vaccination rate amongst all kids. You could adjust the chart above accordingly, if you so choose.
This means, that in the medium-to-long term, as society vaccinates their kids, these numbers, for COVID, are going to get much, much better, while the Flu and automotive deaths will stay the same.
This, to me, is one thing Oster left out of her otherwise very comprehensive article outlining the decision tree: Things are quite likely going to change in the next six months. It could be as soon as two, if your kid if over six.
A childhood vaccine seems imminent, even for our three year old. The decisions we are making now are with that in mind: we are not making decisions now that will last forever. Keeping my kid home for three more months is not the same as keeping her home for a year, or two, or three. It boggles my mind how many people don’t talk about this in their discussions of kids. Of course, some kids can get the vaccine now, so those parents face a different calculus.
There’s a contingent of the population that seems to think all of this is based on fear, but with the entire situation poised to change in a few months, it seems to me pretty irrational to not factor that into the situation.
And, of course, I’m Jane’s primary vector for contracting COVID. I’m the only one leaving the house.
My wife and mother in law are generally homebodies anyway, and we have a lovely house and grounds. It’s not that hard for them. I’m the one who goes out. This is all on me.
So, of course I’m vaccinated. And prior to Delta but after I received my vaccine (oh, those blissful three months), I was not worried about giving COVID to Jane. Now? I mean, I know it’s still unlikely, but it’s probably not impossible. At the risk of perhaps being accused of pulling out a scare quote, one thing I really took away from that article is we just don’t know yet:
“What is the risk of me transmitting to my child if I go to a wedding? What if I wear a mask? We just simply do not know.”
I know the likelihood is low, but it’s on me. And I know that if I passed COVID onto Jane because I got it while grocery shopping, I would feel bad, but not terribly guilty. But I also know if I passed it to Jane because I got it while going to a rock show, I would feel way more guilty.
And I know that if I gave Jane COVID because I really felt like flying up to New York and getting tanked with some friends, I would feel way more guilty.
If my mom or sister suddenly got deathly ill? I would fly, I would go see them immediately. I would deal with it. Of course. But that’s a very different thing than going to a bar or a party or a rock concert.
I also miss those things very much, and very much want to do them again, and when I think of never being able to do those things again, I get very very sad and I want to die and it is a huge bummer.
But it is a very different thing to think about not doing them for four or five more months. That feels doable. That feels… like I can handle it.
Of course the anti-vaxxers could fuck it all up, Omega variant could roll in and screw everything up, but I can’t help that.
And I am deeply, deeply thankful I managed to get to Boston and Fairbanks in the window we had. I so wish I made it to New York, too, but at least I saw friends, hugged people, had a glimpse of what things might be like again, one day.
FOMO is real, and I am super sad I can’t go to rock shows, can’t fly to see my friends. And I completely understand why other people make other decisions: if Jane didn’t exist, I would be there too. In many, many ways I feel profoundly lucky that the pandemic hit at this time: Jane being too young to be severely impacted by it, me living in a big comfortable rural house, being a homebody. Most of my life I was so overwhelmingly social that I felt weird if I stayed in a single night of the week. COVID would have been so much harder emotionally then. But this situation has its own challenges. I’m so sad I won’t be making it up to Boston to see my friends play. I wanted to go so badly. We’re so lonely down here all alone.
But we can make it a few more months.
So. We have brilliant people like Tyler Cowan retweeting shit like this:
Like, yes. Also, as a society, we fucking go full hog on reducing murders and drownings. We are absolutely fourteen times more worried about those things, especially when the societal protections we lack with COVID were lacking there.
Imagine you could send your kid to camp now, but there would be no lifeguard, no murder laws, weights on their feet when they swim, and the whole place was run by John Wayne Gacey.
Or you could wait four whole months and there would be lifeguards, they’d ditch the weights, fire Gacey, hire professionals to manage the place, pass a bunch of safety laws and replace all the equipment with safer swim gear.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here but I assume you’d wait a few months to send your kid to that camp.
Also, as we saw above, their stats are a lie. They only talk about deaths. More kids have probably been injured by long-haul covid than are injured in cars.
Covid’s changed me. I’m not necessarily happier or sadder. But I’m different. It’s weird having it hit in middle age. You were changing anyway. Will there ever be a “normal?” I don’t know. But I do think I can make it a few more months in this routine. I am pretty fuckin sick of it, but there’s a lot of other things I’m sick of that aren’t going to (hopefully) change or get better in four months.
Huh wow. That was long. I was going to write about other things too, but I guess not. Let’s do a mix. All new stuff – still the fruits of my cleaning out the “To Investigate” playlist a week ago. Some smooooth hotel lobby jams here, enjoy. Man I miss hotel lobbies. I even miss this universe’s W Hotel Lobbies. What I wouldn’t give to be trying to find two seats in the lobby of the Union Square W so I can have some overpriced truffle fries and $20 drinks and talk to a friend for an hour or two. Wouldn’t that rule?
Okay! Back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. Thank you.
Don't know what to say except very good read today.
i had a covid scare a couple of weeks ago (all the flulike symptoms except respiratory) and was SO FUCKING SCARED—not even about being sick myself, but about having to write messages to the parents of the under-12s i spent time with in the days before. thankfully it wasn't covid, but i was wracked with guilt until i got the results (and maybe a little bit after). so stressful.
i'm avoiding all unvaccinated kids till delta burns out!