For more than a year and a half my five-person bubble has functioned completely smoothly when it came to risk assessment and choices about how to engage with the outside world. The three adults were all on the same page, and we hardly had to even talk about it.
And then delta…
Yesterday, my older vaccinated kid and their vaccinated friend took off their masks while visiting in a park.
Everyone had agreed to masks ahead of time. On the fly, my husband decided that skipping the masks was acceptable.
I would have ended the visit right then and there.
By the time my husband and kid got home, I’d already seen the pictures of the very much non-distanced, non-masked visit on the friend’s instagram. At first, I assumed they’d sneaked the unmasked pictures when my husband wasn’t looking. Only sort of.
I felt pretty betrayed.
Thus followed an entire day of me, my mom, and my husband arguing, fighting, calmly discussing, and basically hashing from every direction what the hell is going on with the delta variant and what the hell we’re supposed to be doing about it.
And basically, we don’t know.
My husband is more worried about my vaccinated 69-year-old mother getting a breakthrough infection. My mom is most worried about our eight-year-old who can’t be vaccinated yet. Each of them has articles, charts, data, etc. to cite in support of their fears.
I just don’t know.
I don’t know how much to worry or who to worry about most. It’s really hard to make choices when faced with so much uncertainty.
It didn’t help that we were still waiting to hear about the covid tests for my sister and my cousin’s family. (They’ve since all come back negative.)
Fortunately, when we reached out to the friend’s mother, it turns out they’ve recently switched back to being much more careful than earlier this summer too. So, the risk from the unmasked visit should be much lower than I’d feared. It was still a gut punch to see those pictures.
We had already decided to keep the kids in distance school for the next term to protect the eight-year-old until they can be vaccinated too. But this really cements it.
If I can’t trust my own kids to keep their masks on, I certainly don’t trust other kids.
We’re also going back to mostly online shopping for a while, at least until the spike in our county goes down or we have better, clearer information about delta.
I was really slow this summer to accept going back out into the world… but it didn’t protect me from this whiplash.