Fully vaccinated people can now gather in small groups from other households without masks or social distancing!
MY TIMEOUT IS OVER!!!
And if I’m visiting you, yours kind of is too 
Best news ever!
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BEST NEWS EVER!!! I’m so super excited to be able to visit with my parents again! And have our extended family Sunday dinners.
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So, asking as a Canadian observer, does that CDC guidance have to be enacted at the state or county level or something to be in effect?
Small groups indoors I’m reading as at your house, not in public spaces.
I am not aware of any state level (or county, city) rules prohibiting non-household members from visiting at this time. This guidance just tells us it is now SAFE® to do this than it was before, with nobody vaccinated.
Also I don’t think this means a free-for-all. I think this means vaccinated people - from same household or otherwise - can visit with ONE HOUSEHOLD of unvaccinated people at a time. Unvaccinated people from different households should still not be mixing without masks and distancing.
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OK. In Ontario, they’ve empowered by-law officers to demand ID, ticket people and disperse gatherings.
ETA: And in the most densely populated parts of my province, it is illegal to allow visitors into your home unless they live alone and have selected your household as the one they can visit.
On a side note, I was taking it to mean different households could socialize providing both (all) were fully vaccinated. In other words, I didn’t think it related to vaccinated and non-vaccinated.
It does
So my kids’ grandparents can visit them soon. They (the grandparents) will be fully vaccinated in a couple of weeks. My kids - like all kids right now - are not going to be vaccinated. But they can visit together, unmasked and undistanced per this guidance.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated-guidance.html
An excerpt:
" Fully vaccinated people can:
- Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing
- Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing
- Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure if asymptomatic"
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That is awesome news!
Hopefully when we get people vaccinated here, it’ll ease up the lockdown.
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CDC guidance is just that. Any legal restrictions would be enacted on local, state, or federal levels.
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For the most part in the US, states haven’t been mandating ‘lockdowns’ or prohibiting visitors to your home like in Canada or the UK. In VA, we’ve been operating based on numbers of people. Our lowest limit has been 10 people, so technically if you had other household(s) over to your house and exceeded 10 people, you’d be breaking the mandate, but that’s also difficult to enforce.
So it’s not so much that the CDC is saying ‘you’re allowed to do this now.’ They’re saying like @OBNurseNH said, ‘it’s safe to do this now and still prevent spread.’
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I’m thinking of getting one of these, as sort of scarlet letter acting in reverse. 
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very exciting, especially considering my dad got his first dose today!!
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I love the CDC update!
But also, here is reality. My parents are fully vaccinated. My siblings/spouses and I are all in different stages of getting vaccinated (from fully vaccinated to appointments scheduled within the week). Once the adults are all vaccinated we will gather our 7 households together indoors. I’m not waiting until the 15 kids are all vaccinated. 
Probably there are reasons to wait. But realistically it’s not happening. I cannot be alone in this “but all the kids are unvaccinated” group.
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No children are vaccinated yet (unless you would count those in trials)
As with everything, people have to assess for themselves what the risks are. But the CDC guidance would say not to do this. We will follow it for our part.
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I know the CDC errs on the side of caution. We’ve been carefully following guidelines as best we can up until this point. But as the high risk people in my life get vaccinated, I think I’m done. At some point people are going to do what is easy to do and let go of the rest. For better or for worse.
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I see your thinking as very reasonable, from both scientific and human/common sense perspectives. I know what the CDC guidance says and respect everyone’s discretion on how to interpret and apply it in their own lives with the right amounts of common sense and caution.
What I’d look at regarding risk for kids is something like this from the CDC, which is overwhelming to me, and then make my own judgments based on those relative probabilities. Also, think about whether anyone vulnerable and unvaccinated might be interacting with any of the kids, in the chance one of them has covid. If there’s a real risk somewhere that seems unacceptable or iffy, mitigate it accordingly. Family getting together is super important though if there’s no obvious risk to someone that will come of it, in my opinion.
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Is this on the CDC website? TY.
Yes it is. Here’s the whole link. Looks like data as of 2/18/21, which I accidentally cropped off.
Just to share anecdotally what my current behaviors are (which are all more restrictive than AZ laws and regulations):
- Wear a mask in public
- Frequent / daily visits with people in our bubble (my in-laws - 7 people)
- Kids at elementary school with masks and distancing protocols
- Occasionally eating at indoor restaurants with masks removed once food / drinks are served and replaced once dessert or final course is done
- Each child has one friend that they do play dates with either at our house or the friend’s house. Both we and the play date’s family have already had COVID in the household.
- DD4 attends 2-hour / 2x per week preschool in a small group with minimal protocols due to age group
- Attend church with spaced seating and required masks
- Visited my parents for Thanksgiving after two weeks of more strict protocols and COVID test
- Occasional visits with other low-risk individuals outside our household in certain circumstances (e.g. monthly book club with 3-4 friends - put on hiatus when case loads were very high in our area but have since resumed)
Anyway, just offering this up as a sanity check for anyone wondering how their practices compare to another real world person.
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So if I’m reading this correctly, my DS4 is 2x more likely to be hospitalized/die with COVID than my DS6? This is discouraging to me, because DS4 is the high-risk person in our house. 
I know that the risk is still very low that he will even contract the virus (lower probability compared to DS6, according to this CDC table), but I’m still trying to convince DW that we can visit WDW in June. If the overall situation continues to improve (knock on wood!) then I think we can stomach the risk. I’m optimistic…
ETA: DW and I both got our shots, so woohoo for that
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I think you probably have to factor in that newborns fall into that 0-4 category. I’m sure there is a wide range of risk between a 4 week old and a 4 year old.
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