Welp, you can add our family to the list of cautionary tales about vaccinated people getting COVID. My son (Pfizered x2 since June 6) tested positive recently, after being exposed at a church camp. A couple anecdotal observations that support the data we’re seeing about vaccines:
1. He had no symptoms at all. We only tested because others had tested positive. He felt perfectly fine. There was an outbreak of 20+ kids. Most of the unvaccinated kids were very sick. He caught it from an unvaccinated person who felt sick the first night of camp but did not go home.
2. He was “positive” for 2-3 days. He tested positive (PCR) on a Monday, on Tues tested negative on a rapid test and on Wed and Fri tested negative on PCR tests again. (He stayed quarantined for 10 days but I was curious.) The vaccine seemed to flush it out of his body quickly.
3. He did not pass it to any of us (we are all vaccinated). He slept in the same room with his brother for 2 days before we knew. We then quarantined him in the backhouse to avoid more exposure and then quarantined his brother as well. We all tested every 2 days that week.
So he had a mild (symptom-free) case that lasted only a few days and did not spread it to vaccinated family members. We feel fortunate for that, and that we have a backhouse that made a complete isolation possible. That being said:
While there are terrible outcomes to COVID that we avoided, it was an incredibly stressful time. He could have exposed his football team, which could have put them all into quarantine, which would have forfeited the whole team from playing in their first game.
He could have exposed his sister, who would have had to drop out of a play she’s been rehearsing for months. She then could have exposed her castmates leading to the play being canceled.
Exposure to his other sister would have likely meant quarantining her entire class at our local school’s summer camp.
His brother and I had to quarantine for a week, and our family life looked like everyone masked and in their rooms for over a week out of fear he’d given it to one of us. I am very fortunate I work from home or I would have lost a week’s worth of wages. But I still lost a lot of hours (and money) to testing as often as we did.
I’m saying all of this because I want people to understand that not getting vaccinateded is NOT a “personal decision.” It has far-reaching effects beyond just whether or not another individual gets sick. It can affect entire communities of people. And those community effects of a “personal decision” might look like teen disappointments, but it also might look like missed work. And at worst, it might look like hospitalization or death. GET THE VACCINE.
This experience has me very worried for what life will look like when we go back to school. I fear the next year will be an endless stream of exposures, quarantines, cancellations and disappointments for our kids, who have already paid a heavy toll to this pandemic.
I regret sending him to this camp/not asking better questions of their protocols. I was wanting to say yes after a year of no’s and feeling the pressure of all of his friends going. It’s been a rough year+ of my kids feeling like the only kids staying home.
Anyways, we learn and adjust. We are scaling back, masking, and having to ask hard and awkward questions because I’m not willing to expose my kids to unvaccinated people anymore. Even if it makes for hard convos and hurt feelings. And yes, I know vaccinated people can also spread the virus. But the chance is much, much lower. We’ve done our very best as a family to mitigate not only our own risk but our risk to our community, and I’m drawing boundaries w/ people and organizations who won’t do the same.
