Doctors and their own kids:
How Bay Area pediatricians and other experts are keeping their unvaccinated children safe.
Bay Area health experts are seeing parent anxiety creep up as they monitor the spread of the highly infectious delta variant of the coronavirus and weigh the safety of their children who are too young for vaccination.
The Chronicle reached out to infectious disease experts and pediatricians to check on how they are keeping their kids safe.
They describe a blend of common sense and highwire decisions amid many unknowns.
“It’s a challenging time to be a parent right now,” said Dr. Sarah Doernberg , an infectious disease expert at UCSF. “There needs to be a balance.”
She said that her children, a secondgrader and a fourthgrader in San Francisco public schools, attend summer camps and will return to inperson classrooms in the fall, when California will require students to wear masks. Doernberg said she makes sure hers wear masks indoors in all public spaces.
Her family also decided to skip any trips this year that would require airplane flights.
“My general rule of thumb is if I can avoid putting my kids in situations that are higher risk, I do so,” Doernberg said. She said she and her husband leave the children home and mask up for errands such as grocery shopping since “it’s a mix of people we don’t know. We don’t know if they’re vaccinated.”
She acknowledged many unanswered questions around delta. “As far as risk to kids for this variant, I don’t think we know yet what the longerterm implications will be. For that reason, doing some of the things we know are effective at preventing its spread makes sense, like having kids masked.”
California on Wednesday recommended that everyone, even vaccinated people, wear masks in indoor public settings. The federal government, which made similar recommendations Tuesday for much of the country, cited new data that vaccinated people can spread the virus as efficiently as those who have not received their jabs — meaning parents can pass it along to their kids.
Dr. Kate Babington, a pediatrician with Sutter Bay Medical Foundation Family Medicine and mother of two children under 12, is still following safety practices that became routine last year: masking in public, frequent handwashing and a degree of “judiciousness.”
“It’s about recognizing we have control over things,” said Babington. “The delta variant hasn’t changed my take that the coronavirus is out there and that I don’t want my kids to get any form of COVID.”
To maintain her children’s social connections, Babington plans lowrisk activities: backyard playdates, swim lessons and outdoor sports.
“We look at the setting,” she said. An indoor trampoline park near their home does not make the cut.
Dr. Anne Liu, an infectious disease expert with Stanford, has a vaccinated seventhgrader but her fourthgrader is too young to be eligible for the vaccine. Noting that the delta variant can spread more easily in contexts that were previously considered safe, she said, “Just being outdoors may not be as protective as we think when people are crowded together.”
Among the unknowns is whether children will suffer from long COVID symptoms if they get sick.
Babington’s patients include children infected with the coronavirus, and she has gained an understanding of where and when they were exposed. Observing that people have become fatigued with restrictions and stopped being as diligent as they were last year, she has been taking more precautions at work.
She now wears gloves, goggles, and an N95 mask when seeing patients, rather than a simple surgical mask. She masks up in most indoor settings, and outside around people other than her family.
“Any time we’re at an inflection point where new data is coming in, I tend to be more conservative,” Babington said.
There is some risk that fully vaccinated adults can become infected without symptoms and act as vectors for the virus.
“The vaccines seem to be holding the line in terms of preventing almost all severe illnesses,” Liu said. “But when delta can replicate at a much faster rate, it is entirely understandable that would put our unvaccinated child at risk for picking it up from us.”
The experts unanimously hope to send their children back to school in person in the fall, despite some studies indicating that the young are more susceptible to the delta variant.
“To me, it is a different calculus from an indoor playdate,” Liu said. “School is not optional. With all the protections in place, to me, it is a risk that is worth taking for the benefits of inperson education.”
She is reserving a final decision, however, until seeing more data on delta’s impact on children.
Doernberg also sees the benefits outweighing risk when it comes to returning children to classrooms.
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she said. “For me, going to a bar with a friend indoors is not worth the risk. Whereas my children learning to read and interact with others and setting the building blocks for their future is important.”
Babington said she’ll trust public health officials “far above my own instincts,” on sending the kids into school rooms.
“I definitely will if it’s recommended by public health experts,” Babington said.
They all agree that families with young children are left to navigate what appears to be an increasingly worrying landscape.
“It’s very tough,” said Liu. “It’s hard to grade different risks. I feel for all the parents who have to make these decisions.”