On Monday, the health experts at the Centers for Disease Control, updated their recommendations for people who have had their COVID vaccinations.
Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People
Updated Mar. 8, 2021
This is the first set of public health recommendations for fully vaccinated people. This guidance will be updated and expanded based on the level of community spread of SARS-CoV-2, the proportion of the population that is fully vaccinated, and the rapidly evolving science on COVID-19 vaccines…
According to the CDC guidance, people are considered ‘fully vaccinated’ for COD-19 if it’s been at least 14 days… since they have received the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine… or since after they’ve received the single-dose Johnson and Johnson/Janssen vaccine.
From the recommendations:
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
I read through the six pages of guidance pretty carefully, hoping to find out if it’s safe to kiss. Especially, I wanted to know the risks of kissing someone who is not vaccinated. Not that I have anyone special in mind. Just curious. In case an opportunity popped up suddenly.
It’s one thing to say we can “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…”)
But… can we kiss them?
All the scientists at the CDC want to talk about, are dinner parties.
Indoor visits between fully vaccinated people who do not wear masks or physically distance from one another are likely low risk. For example, if you are fully vaccinated, it is likely a low risk for you to invite other fully vaccinated friends to dinner inside your private residence…
And that’s if both of you are ‘fully vaccinated’. Which, as we all know, isn’t always the case. The Kaiser Family Foundation did a survey in late January, and found that 51% of Americans are either refusing to be vaccinated, or want to “wait and see” how the vaccine works out before making a decision. (They didn’t say how long they were planning to wait.)
The Daily Post shared an essay yesterday, by writer Victoria Knight, who noted that online dating sites are seeing an uptick in people claiming they’ve already been vaccinated. These vaccinated people would most likely be either people working in the healthcare industry (and we wonder if they even have time for kissing?)… or people over the age of 70 (and we wonder if they even remember how to kiss?)
Reading through the CDC’s March 8 guidance, I found 29 references to “risk” behaviors. But the word “kiss” doesn’t appear anywhere in the entire document.
Are all the people working at the CDC over the age of 70? It’s beyond me, how anyone could write six pages of recommendations concerning unsafe human relationships, and never once use the word “kiss” — one of the most commonly used words in the English language, right up there next to “the”… and “is”… and “bananas”.
I dug a little deeper into the CDC website, trying to determine why they are trying to ignore the reality of human romance, as a possible cause of death. The CDC publishes regular reports about mortality, and one study I came across claimed that 2 million Americans died in 1980, of various causes.
The same report claimed that 2.7 million Americans died in 2016. (Sounds like 2016 was a particularly bad year?)
Apparently, not a single person died — in 1980, or in 2016 — from kissing. At least, I couldn’t find ‘kissing’ in the list of ’causes of death’.
But now the world seems to be turned upside down. Who knows how many people are seriously risking their lives, doing foolish things, during a global pandemic?
Not even the CDC knows. Or at least, they’re not telling…
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.