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Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make your life easier through the pandemic, with expert answers to your toughest coronavirus dilemmas. While we cannot and do not offer medical advice – these questions should be directed to your doctor – we hope this column helps you sort through this stressful and confusing time. you have a question? Write to us at [email protected].
Today, EB in New York is asking:
I hope my parents and in-laws will be vaccinated soon. My husband, my child and I don’t expect to be vaccinated for some time. How should we ask ourselves if it is safe to spend time together in a mixed vaccination group? Could they get on a plane and fly to visit us without a mask and inside? Or are there enough risks that we should expect to be all vaccinated (which can be very long especially with children in the mix)? Or divide the difference and take some precautions?
To be clear, we are in a strange state of limbo right now. The vaccines that we have been eagerly awaiting for almost a year are here, and yet… nothing in our daily lives has really changed. Unfortunately, this will be the case a little longer.
“The end is in sight,” says Dr. Colleen Kelley, vaccine researcher and associate professor of infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine in Georgia. “I just don’t know it’s now.”
Immunizing your loved ones is definitely a step forward, says Kelley. It would certainly be safeEast visit your parents or in-laws after receiving both doses of the vaccine, but theEast the plan is to wait until you and your husband are also vaccinated, she says.
The two coronavirus vaccines currently licensed in the United States – those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – are both extremely effective in preventing people from getting sick with COVID-19. This is a huge benefit in itself, especially for people at high risk for serious illness, such as the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.
But the open question is whether COVID-19 vaccines also prevent people from being asymptomatically infected with the virus. Early evidence suggests that both injections offer at least some protection against asymptomatic infection, and many experts are optimistic about their chances of stopping transmission, but the data is still in place.
If vaccines turn out not to completely stop asymptomatic infections, even your vaccinated parents could make your family sick if they picked up anything while traveling to see you. Or, if you were exposed to the virus, your parents could potentially carry it and pass it on to others. And, while licensed COVID-19 vaccines are very effective, there’s always a tiny chance that they’ll fail, leaving your parents at risk for illness.
These are all the worst case scenarios, of course. But given the uncertainty and the extent of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, Kelley says you should wait a little longer to visit your parents and in-laws. If that’s not possible, you need to take the same precautions you’ve been hearing about for a year: quarantine beforehand, and ideally stay outside and masked when possible.
But here’s the good news. Once you and your husband are fully immunized (along with a larger portion of the general population), Kelley says you can feel much better spending time with other vaccinated people inside and unmasked, even if your little one has not yet been vaccinated.
As you suggest, it may be some time before children under the age of 16 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination, as pharmaceutical companies are not yet finished testing their injections on young children. But “if the toddler is the only one not getting vaccinated, I would say that’s a pretty darn safe scenario,” Kelley says.
Fortunately, young children rarely get seriously ill with COVID-19, so once all the adults in the room are fully protected, Kelley says you can feel pretty comfortable with your parents or in-laws who come for a visit.
“We’re not going to get to a situation without risk,” Kelley says, “but we’re going to go to safer, more secure places.”
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