Sure, Go on Vacation with Your Unvaccinated Kids — Away from Unvaccinated People
Your unvaccinated child is nothing like a vaccinated grandma.
We all have mental lists of the things we’ve missed most during the pandemic, and we’re eager to get back to some semblance of normalcy that seems promised by the vaccines. While the CDC has affirmed that vaccinated adults can safely get together, parents still have to consider what gatherings and travel mean without the ability to vaccinate their children for many months to come. It’s been suggested that children’s mostly mild infections and low susceptibility to severe outcomes eases this decision-making because parents can think of their unvaccinated child’s risk of the worst outcomes — hospitalization and death — as less than the risk faced by vaccinated older adults. In terms of direct risk to most children, based on the (very incomplete) evidence we have to date, that much is true.
But making the leap from that fact to the idea that parents can blissfully tote along their unvaccinated children to whatever vacations or gatherings they want, as a recent article in The Atlantic proposed, is faulty — and dangerous — logic. Let’s examine why. And then we’ll get to what parents can do with their kids without increasing kids’ risks or endangering public health.
