I’m happy to report that as of this weekend, our entire family has been vaccinated against COVID-19 with the kids getting their first Pfizer shots on Saturday!
Frankly, I hate how political this vaccine has gotten and I have a hard time understanding anyone’s justification for not getting it after over five million people have died from COVID globally since this pandemic started, well, 625 days ago…
But that’s not what I wanted to focus on when I set out to write this post because if anything, having our kids vaccinated is a huge relief for my wife and I because it represents the next big step towards getting back to normal … whatever that even is anymore. A lot of our habits and things we would do as a family have changed over the last two years, although some of them are honestly just as much to blame on the age of the kids as they are on the virus itself.
Eating out, for example, certainly isn’t something that I look forward to when I have to spend most of my meal chasing kids and begging them to sit in their seats and not make a gigantic mess of everything within reach at the table!
Going to the store is something that I’ve done with the kids one-on-one, even with Matthew recently, as long as they’re being good about wearing their masks.
And of course, theme parks have been out of the question, although I think now with everyone vaccinated we’re just about ready to try hitting up Legoland on the weekend again if they can hook us up with a good enough deal this week for Black Friday! 😉
Whether we’ll still wear masks on occasion when we’re out and about is probably up in the air – I had to make a grocery run to Publix earlier today and wore mine, even though very few non-employees had them on anymore. In that scenario, it almost feels like a gesture of good faith if service workers are going to be required to wear them, going back to the mantra all along that we wear masks to protect the other people around us while they wear them to protect us.
I’ll probably write a more in depth post in the near future about lessons learned from this crazy pandemic, but if nothing else, I really hope that my kids have picked up something about being compassionate for the people around us because despite friends and family having caught COVID to varying degrees along the way, we’re very lucky that none of us directly have gotten it.
Sure, the survival rate for COVID globally has been somewhere around 98% and we know skews higher for younger people, but we mustn’t forget that the five million dead figure that I cited earlier comes from a quarter of a billion people on Earth catching COVID … “only 2%” of 250,000,000 is 5,000,000, and that’s not even taking into account cases and deaths in developing countries that may be underreported or long-term effects that we won’t know the fully impact of for years to come.
So like I said, I’m very thankful that my family was able to add this level of protection to the masking and social distancing and other measures we’ve been taking since this whole thing came to light some twenty months ago at this point. I wish that more people would get vaccinated – as we stand, the USA has roughly 59% fully vaccinated and 69% partially vaccinated – because I don’t know what it’ll truly take to move into the next phase for this thing when more than just the deniers are able to put it behind them.
But we’re doing our part, along with nearly three million other kids to date. And that’s something.