I've been pretty calm about Pete doing stuff with Scouts. On campouts he shares a tent with another vaccinated kid, and it's hard to get COVID outside. Even if another Scout showed up sick, it wouldn't be very likely to spread during outdoor activities.
But now things are different. I just sent him off on a campout that is going to be riskier than I realized. It will start with a 1.5-hour masks-optional bus ride, and they will be spending most of their time indoors once they arrive. It's not as if I want him to go sleep in a tent outside by himself in this weather, but it is true that his odds of COVID would decline if he did so (even as his odds of frostbite rose).
He especially wanted to go this weekend because they'll be planning their activities for the next year. I made the mistake of assuming they'd be planning outdoors.
I do not feel confident in my ability to assess the risks here. I am guessing that something like 40% of the kids on these campouts are vaccinated, but I am only guessing. We are having a little post-Halloween COVID spike here in Gladlyville, mostly concentrated among younger folks. Lots of messy questions, right?
I am frustrated by the voices saying prematurely "we're just going to have to learn to live with it!" when COVID caused more deaths in September than anything else except heart disease. No one would suggest that we should all just make our peace with cancer, I don't think, and COVID killed more people in September than all the varieties of cancer combined. No one would suggest nonchalance about strokes, one would hope, but the number of September stroke deaths was less than a quarter of the number of September COVID deaths. There's a lot more work to do before we can treat COVID like a garden-variety disease. Does some chunk of that work consist of me telling my 16-year-old that he should hunker back down until it's easier to do things outside again?
I do not know the answer to that question.
Recent Comments