When we started making plans for Christmas, Omicron wasn’t on the horizon. Rates were comparatively low across the country. Here we’ve settled into 10-15 new cases/100K per day.
Now we’re looking at traveling to the Midwest. Cases in the counties we’re planning on staying have rates between 50 and 70 new cases per 100K.
I bought cute POSH masks with Christmas designs and a few Enro Christmas masks that I guess we won’t be using (with such high community transmission we need to go with more protective fancy disposable masks).
We had thought that everyone in SIL’s family had gotten covid except the two girls. One of the girls is supposed to be staying in the house with us, so DH asked MIL if SIL’s older two kids had been vaccinated (the older boy we knew had gotten covid recently so we weren’t as concerned about him). MIL said she didn’t know. So we asked SIL. Turns out that only the youngest girl never had a positive covid test, and they think she must have gotten it because covid came from daycare and she never quarantined away from her twin brother and they even shared bottles while he had covid. The older two have not been vaccinated but have had covid within the last 90 days. Their pediatrician recommends waiting 90 days before getting a vaccine for kids who have had covid because of potential for increased risk of the enlarged heart thing. On top of that, it is literally impossible to get a pediatric shot in their town. I checked– vaccines.gov only lists “call here” places. The main place is a Saturday clinic with short hours from their county health department and there’s a wait list that she’s on for when the 90 days are up. She did think that the closest place she could get them shots was 50 min away in the city we’ll be staying at, but vaccines.gov notes a couple of pharmacies in a town 30 min away that she didn’t know about until DH sent her the link.
Then while DH was on the phone with his mom, she casually mentioned that she’d invited DH’s aunt (not the Trump supporter) who lives in a suburb of the place we’ll be staying and her three kids and their, I think 6 grandkids, to come over for pizza to our AirBNB on Dec 23rd. One of the kids runs a daycare. One of them manages a Target. One of them is a court stenographer. I don’t know what their husbands do. DH didn’t say anything, but later texted his mom to ask if she knew if they were vaccinated or had had covid recently. His mom replied that she did not know and could not ask them as she had already made the invitation(!) and she would just meet them at a restaurant instead(!) since it was our airBNB not hers(!).
That, along with the conversation that DH had with his sister about how rates are crazy in their town but have died down here and it’s easy to get professional tests here (but not easy to get at-home tests) caused us to check on county rates of transmission.
Now DH is depressed. I don’t know what to tell him. I’m worried. DH and I are boosted. DC1 and DC2 are both fully vaccinated. So even if we got Delta we’d probably be ok. Even more ok if we got Omicron, probably.
I’ve been trying to buy tests, but they’ve been sold out and the ones that I ordered have been delayed. We may have gotten lucky today at a distant Walgreens. (If we get lucky, it will be $10/FlowFlex and if we only get somewhat lucky it will be $23/set of Binax. Currently we’re trying to get 12 sets at 4 sets per place that we’re trying… so somewhere between $120 and $276. I am concerned that we will end up in January with a ton of home tests but none before our trip.) I know the tests aren’t perfect, but I also feel like if we’re stuck in a second best situation because of decisions DH’s family makes, it will be better if we have a test we can just whip out. [Update: we have gotten 8 of the FlowFlex tests.]
We’ve been going through potential scenarios so we don’t have to make decisions in the moment. What if SIL’s kids have obvious colds? What do we do? What if one of us gets sick, what do we do? How do we deal with MIL going out unmasked in a restaurant indoors in an area with extremely high transmission rates?
It all makes me wish we weren’t going.