Are you suggesting that more days of work have been lost to vaccine reactions than to covid? Or??? I mean, yes, it'd be awesome if the vaccine didn't have any side effects, but getting covid is a whole lot harder on people with no sick leave (and everyone else) than getting the vaccine. I don't personally know anyone who was unable to work for more than a day or two, and the vast majority not even that; there are very few people who literally never have a day off and can't schedule shots around those days. ETA: whereas covid requires, what, AT LEAST 7 days off work, even if you have a mild case.

I'm annoyed with the school systems that have done that, too, but since it happened within hours of the CDC announcement, it's clear that they're linked. I think that was a predictable result and one reason why I think the CDC showed poor judgement in making the announcement when they did and in not clarifying what it meant for places like schools (they've since said they don't recommend getting rid of masking in schools this school year, but...too little, too late in a lot of cases).

so I just checked the NYT covid page, which is where I check in the most often, and their numbers are based on all residents, including children not yet eligible to vaccinated (it's 37% fully vaccinated and 47% at least one dose, btw): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

I've seen it both ways.

I'll say that I just went to Aldi and pretty much everyone was masked, which was good to see. It will be interesting to see if, as some people have suggested, mask behavior remains largely unchanged, with areas that where people are already good about masking staying that way. I'm definitely aware that mask mandates aren't the only thing that make people choose to mask, since I live in an area that has never had one but still has been good about masking. We'll see. I'm glad we'll be traveling in the northeast this summer instead of some other parts of the country.

I disagree that taking human behavior into account when making recommendations=ignoring the science. The previous recommendations already made it clear that vaccinated people are unlikely to transmit the virus by saying that indoor household gatherings of vaccinated people were fine (ETA: I believe it said low risk unvaccinated people from one household were also fine at said gatherings. I.e. the idea was that you don't want a bunch of unvaccinated people getting together). There are plenty of way to acknowledge both the reality that vaccinated people are unlikely to transmit and the difficulties posed by enforcement. Tying relaxing mask recommendations to a certain level of community spread or to a certain percent vaccinated for example. No one is suggesting they lie about transmission. Given that the new guidelines will make my 8 year old both less safe and less confident in navigating the world, I wish they had done that. I rate his safety and confidence higher than people being able to go without a mask in indoor public spaces. They're betting that this will do more good than harm, and I certainly hope they're right, but I have my doubts.

You can also be factual about people's tendency to be dishonest.

yes. on this very board there are multiple people who have said that the CDC announcement will (or would, if they had younger kids) cause them to allow their unvaccinated kids to stop wearing masks.

I guess I don't get why "this will make things less safe for our unvaccinated kids" is so hard to understand. I'm not outraged about it or anything. I just think it's a bad idea and that it's going to make life harder in the short term for my 8 year old and me.

Well, for me it's mostly about kids. I don't WANT unvaccinated adults to get covid, but I do think that at a certain point you have to say that everyone's had a chance to be vaccinated and that's the best you can do (with caveats, like continued outreach to get hesitant people or populations with poor access vaccinated and that this is dependent on numbers continuing to go down, health care systems not being overwhelmed, etc). If I had, say, an 11 year old kid in school right now, in a system like I mentioned that immediately did away with its mask mandate, I'd be LIVID that a bait and switch like this had been pulled--people made decisions about sending kids to school based on certain precautions being taken, and now that's suddenly changed. My own situation is that I have an 8 year old who has some anxiety about covid. We've worked on it a lot and he's felt good about venturing out more. We work hard to reassure him that there are guidelines in place to keep all of us safe, and that we're following these guidelines. That's a lot harder to do if we start encountering more and more places where hardly anyone is wearing a mask. He's not a dummy; he's going to ask me if all of those people are really vaccinated, and I'm not going to lie to him. So we'll see what happens. I think the number one concern right now should be getting numbers down as fast as possible. I think that's what the CDC thinks they're doing, by incentivizing getting vaccinated, but I have my doubts that that will actually happen.

Well, that's terrifying. I feel like there's a lot of hubris in assuming covid variants don't have a good chance of mutating to be more dangerous to kids. My observation so far is that covid generally does a great job of meeting and exceeding everyone's most pessimistic predictions (on the good side, the vaccines are also exceeding expectations so far).

I posted in the other thread but I think that, while there are plenty of people who are performative anti-maskers and want to make a show of it, there are plenty more who have been wearing masks to avoid confrontations, but will ditch them happily now that they're given cover. In my area there are no mask mandates (except in private businesses) but mask compliance is generally pretty good. We'll see if that changes now, but I'll be surprised if it doesn't. And the school district next door to me already did away with its mask mandate for "fully vaccinated" people. But they won't be asking for any verification of vaccination status. So there's nothing to stop older kids from lying about their vaccine status and taking masks off in full classrooms with kids not old enough to be vaccinated yet.

1. Many people don't believe that people will be honest about their vaccine status. It will not only mean vaccinated people stop masking. 2. Kids can't be vaccinated yet.

I have a naturally introverted kid who's actually loved staying home so much this year. Hanging out with his parents and his older brothers suits him fine. But right before the pandemic I felt like we were making progress getting him to venture out of his comfort zone and enjoy hanging out with other kids, so it's been a bummer to have all of that undone. Most of our homeschooling friends have been pretty cautious during the pandemic--varying degrees of caution, but nothing that makes me uncomfortable hanging out with them again as a group in the future (we've seen people outside a few times over the past year, but nothing in a group and nothing regular), so I'm hopeful that we can pick up where we left off by fall, but I do worry about him having missed a year of social interaction and how comfortable he'll be with it going forward. I don't know how much that's my own hang up, though--as I said, HE thinks it's totally fine (and he did play baseball this spring and had a good time and seemed to get along fine with the other kids, which made me feel a bit better). That's all my 8 year old. My older kids have been fine; they have one close friend who lives down the street who they've hung out with a ton (outside) all year, and they have a lot of online contact with other friends. I'll echo that as kids get older I think it makes sense for them to start finding friends at activities that aren't necessarily homeschool specific. My oldest was also always slow to make friends and tended to have just one or two close friends at a time--but he started doing theater in high school and ended up with a nice group of casual friends through that. My two middle kids do youth orchestra with mostly non-homeschooled kids and have also done stuff like D&D at the library.

So you think that we're all being too cynical and that people won't lie about their vaccination status so they can shed their masks and also that the CDC has already taken into account that lots of people will lie about their vaccination status so they can shed their masks?

I've already said that I'd be fine with mask mandates going away when everyone who wants to has had a chance to be vaccinated and/or when numbers are very low. 30,000 + cases a day in the US is not low (it's about the same as in September). I just don't think it's a good faith argument to say "if not now WHEN?!" when we're still seeing 600 deaths a day, kids can't be vaccinated yet, and our numbers are still where they were right before the fall/winter surge started. I don't THINK we're going back there, barring problems with variants in the future, but I think stopping precautions too early will cause the numbers to go down more slowly than they would otherwise. I'd rather they went down quickly.

I am curious how the people who believe masks don't do much of anything explain how there's been so little flu this year. It seems clear that something we're doing because of Covid caused that and that what we've done would have been enough against a less tricky virus. I've put my feelings about masks out there before; I started off assuming they were better than nothing but probably not enough in indoor spaces for extended periods. Then I looked at the differences in numbers between schools near me with masking and ones without (it's the difference between incidence rates similar to the larger community and incidence rates several times higher) and became much more convinced that masks work and work well when everyone is wearing them consistently. Putting that together with other evidence I've seen and read (and with a husband who didn't get covid despite teaching in full classrooms since september) is plenty for me.

We haven't been back in person and won't until late summer at least...my 8 year old's Sunday school is still meeting over Zoom, so there's no reasonable way for him to do that and us to go back in person. And I'm not sure if I'm comfortable bringing him (or my 15 year old who just had his first shot) to the indoor services yet anyway. We'll be out of town from mid June to August, so I've figured there was no reason to start back up in person before that; I'm hopeful that things will be looking good in August and we'll be ready to go back.

15 year old has his first shot yesterday--mild sore arm today. Both of his parents and two of his brothers are fully vaccinated with nothing worse than sore arms and a little fatigue after the second shot for a couple of us (both with moderna), so I'll be surprised if he has anything more dramatic.

I remember my stepmother very earnestly explaining why she thought Bill Clinton was the antichrist back in the day. The more things change.... My favorite response to all my stepmother's talk about the end times was when my lifelong Baptist grandmother scoffed and said, "preachers have been saying all that since I was a little girl!"

The list looks somewhat similar for deaths IF you take out the northeast. So top 15 is NJ, NY, MA, RI, MS, AZ, CT, LA, SD, AL, PA, IN, ND, MI, NM. You still get ND and SD in there and places like AL and LA. What you add in is more densely populated states that got hit early, including the northeast and also Michigan. I don't know....it's hard to see much of a pattern outside of things were really bad in the northeast early and in the Dakotas later. There's a big element of luck, too, since so much depends on superspreader events and so many cases don't spread much or at all. Like how South Korea was bad early on, but pretty much entirely because of that megachurch outbreak.

yes, and the same is true for Georgia. I'd be interested to see an analysis based on stuff like education level/income level/etc. Florida and Georgia both have large urban populations with a lot of wealthy and college educated people. The thing about restrictions is that NOWHERE in the US really locked down that much long term. Mask mandates were often not enforced, churches were allowed to meet even when gatherings were otherwise restricted in some places, there was nothing anyone could do about private family gatherings that were responsible for a lot of spread in the winter surge, etc. So I suspect it mattered a lot more what level of caution people chose to take on their own. Or what level they were allowed to take; wealthier people are much more likely to have been able to work from home the whole time, for example.

They haven't been following CDC guidelines about anything EXCEPT masks all year (and many other districts haven't even been doing that), so I seriously doubt it.

A giant metro Atlanta school district near me dropped their mask mandate as soon as the CDC announcement was made (for vaccinated people, but no one's checking). We've never had a statewide mask mandate for anything, schools included.

This isn't really that, but looking at the numbers by state is really interesting and kind of hard to figure out. The top ten states for cases per 100,000 are ND, RI, SD, IA, TN, UT, AZ, NE, OK, and SC. So it certainly doesn't seem like being a sparsely populated state HELPS--the opposite if anything. What you don't see on the list are relatively densely populated states that took few precautions, like Florida and Georgia. You also don't see any states that DID take a lot of precautions, though (except RI, I assume). The list gets a lot more Northeast-centric when you look at deaths, I imagine mostly because of their unlucky beginning of the pandemic timing. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/