*NOT March Madness-related*
We made it a full year.... without a quarantine required in our family...until now.
As COVID has emerged and evolved and as all of our lives have been turned upside down, what I have personally feared the most was not getting ill with COVID or dying but rather spreading it (even with masking and all the precautions) to vulnerable people, like OB patients, and the chaos that personal or child quarantines would do with respect to our clinics, my call schedule, and all the patients and other providers it would inconvenience should we need to stay at home for various lengths of time in either isolation or beyond (in staggered fashion--our nightmare scenario would be a positive kid or kids and subsequently negative/asymptomatic but subsequently quarantined adults, or the reverse!).
Kelvin and I never had the viable option not to send our kids to group childcare or into someone else's hands (unless one of us quit our job, a decision which I know many families have had to make). We work essentially full time (and I often work nights and weekends in a one-in-four call group). We have no family around for back-up babysitters. The childcare stayed open even last March for our kids and for those of essential workers, with masking, temperature checking, and many routine precautions implemented. To my knowledge, the childcare had only one two-week shut-down of one infant room (where the kids are unmasked), early in the pandemic and pre-vaccination, with an adult-related exposure (not kid-related spread). It has been truly amazing what they've done safely and for our community (and more reason and evidence that public schools, at least locally, should have long-ago been able to be open safely). I miraculously evaded notable COVID exposures at work, at least before we could be vaccinated, with rigid screening protocols and PPE-wearing, as well as responsible local behavior from us and others to keep community spread low.
With various cough/cold symptoms in the last year, the kids have had to be swabbed for COVID multiple times already (Iver estimates it's been about six times for him, eight for Niall) in order to consider returning to school when better (rather than ten or more days later). Kelvin has in recent months had some voluntary nasal swabs done at work for asymptomatic surveillance testing of the workforce (which hasn't caught positives in any vaccinated staff); I, finding this activity pretty low-yield since vaccination, have opted out of this surveillance as it just seems like "just one more thing to do" in already-overburdened and long workdays. I have survived the first year of the pandemic without personally needing to be COVID-tested, which feels quite good in that we've done a great job of staying safe and healthy!
Niall, swab #6 or so... (he said he'd self-swab but opted not to)
None of us in the family have had to be COVID-quarantined, either... until this week. We were notified on Friday of a COVID exposure in Iver's childcare "kinder" room with last contact early last week and thus he has had to stay out of school(s) this full week. Our local Public Health Department has allowed a 10-day quarantine for the room's kids if testing was performed (which was recommended on day 5 after last contact-- and negative to date for our son), which concludes at the end of this work-week. Thankfully, Iver has been able to be able to be cared for by his vaccinated childcare teacher from his vacated childcare room (vaccinated asymptomatic adults don't necessarily need to be on quarantine, but we still are having them wear masks when together), and we (asymptomatic and vaccinated contacts of a contact) are able to still go to work and serve our patients (and Niall, an unvaccinated but asymptomatic sibling, has been allowed to go to preschool). As Iver has had to miss two-days-a-week in-person kindergarten (which is a different site than his childcare), he has had to revert to being a "distance learner" for public school this week. This series of events obviously demonstrates the huge headache and pitfalls of these part-time, cohort, and hybrid learning schedules for families like ours and the risks of multiple places of exposure, although Iver is actually thrilled to (short-term) have one-on-one attention in babysitting (he's been waking up at 5:30 a.m. with excitement and independently making a half-hour-by-half-hour schedule for the days!), and he is used to Zooming into "school" since that's all he's known from August to mid-March.
We will probably have Iver re-tested at the end of the week to, with hope, feel completely safe to have him return on Monday to both kindergarten (AM) and childcare (I'm very curious if any of the quarantined kids in his room will end up testing positive) and be around other kids. We are blessed that this has been our first family "exposure" and technical individual quarantine, although it sort of feels like we've been quarantined for a year due to our low contact with others outside of work and "school." While we are obviously, like everyone across the country and world, fatigued by all things COVID and sick of dealing with/worrying about all of these moving parts, ten (or up to fourteen) days of being out of "school" in the span of a horrendously long year really isn't much time at all, and we've gotten pretty good at the staying-at-home life (and familiar with Zoom school). Thank God for vaccines and vaccinated adults, and that we haven't had more of these disruptive episodes in the past year...
We still are all COVID-free. But the avoiding-quarantine streak has been broken. When will it be the next time and who?
