Do kids too young for COVID vaccines need to wear masks? Navigating new CDC guidance
Some days after federal health officials announced fully vaccinated Americans no longer have to wear masks in most indoor and all outdoor scenarios, they clarified information on one group left out of the new guidance: kids.
Children between 12 and 15 years old can now receive a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but those who are younger and those who await vaccination are advised to follow the same guidance for unvaccinated adults. That is, continue to wear masks, physical distance and wash hands often.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommends schools “continue to use COVID-19 prevention strategies,” at least for the remainder of the current school year.
What the new guidance doesn’t include is advice for vaccinated parents with kids under 12 who aren’t yet eligible for a shot — a move, or lack thereof, that has left many parents scrambling for answers.
“For me, it wasn’t a time to celebrate,” Janie Able, a mother of two 7-year-old girls in Omaha, Nebraska, told USA Today. “My husband and I are vaccinated, but what about my children?”
“I absolutely don’t trust people to do what’s right and wear their masks if they’re not vaccinated. And that’s going to put my children at risk. I know it’s a low percentage, but there are children who have gotten it and been affected,” Able told the outlet. “What if it was your kid? I would take a gamble on myself. But my children? Never.”
It may ultimately come down to individual risks unique to each family, experts say, with parents having to consider factors such as infection trends and vaccination uptake in their communities, as well as how many people might attend a specific indoor or outdoor event they plan to attend.
“You have to think about the risk to the child,” Dr. Emily Souder, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, told ABC6. “Choosing outdoor whenever possible, interacting with other vaccinated groups would lower risk. As more people choose to be vaccinated, which hopefully will be the case, [infections] will continue to go down, so I think children overall will be at lower risk just because the virus circulating in the community will be lower.”
As of May 13, more than 3.9 million children have been infected with the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Across 43 states, New York City, Puerto Rico and Guam, 308 children have died from COVID-19, or about 0.06% of the total deaths in those locations.
“At this time, it still appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is rare among children,” the group said in a statement. “However, there is an urgent need to collect more data on longer-term impacts of the pandemic on children, including ways the virus may harm the long-term physical health of infected children, as well as its emotional and mental health effects.”
Despite the low risks still involved, experts say vaccinated parents can live “an unmasked lifestyle now” as long as everyone in a family is healthy and not vulnerable to severe disease, Dr. Emily Landon, executive medical director of infection prevention and control at the University of Chicago Medicine, told NPR.
But vaccinated parents must also consider the fact that kids are the world’s best copycats, and that their behavior might want to model that of their children.
“Kids often do what they see their parents do. And I know a lot of my close friends who are physicians who have children under the age of 12, and I have a child who’s not fully vaccinated yet because he’s only 12,” Landon told the outlet. “And we think it’s really important to continue to wear masks, in solidarity with our kids, to help them feel like they’re not an outlier and to make sure that we’re setting a good example for them.”
This story was originally published May 20, 2021 at 9:35 AM with the headline "Do kids too young for COVID vaccines need to wear masks? Navigating new CDC guidance."
