It’s hard to believe it is August, and schools will be opening in a matter of weeks (if not days). With children returning to classrooms, the COVID virus and its Delta variant have new opportunities to spread. Each of us can help slow the spread of COVID and the hospitalizations and deaths it brings.

If finally obtaining the vaccine was not on your summer to-do list, I urge you to do so now for the sake of those schoolchildren. We are about to thrust a generation into closed rooms, with or without masks, greatly increasing the possibility that they will come in contact and become sick from COVID-19. While we cannot be sure how sick they may become, or their risk of death, we know that their illness can result in exposure to the virus by others with less robust immune systems and greater comorbidity. As every parent (and grandparent) knows, as soon as a child starts going to classes, they bring home colds and other sicknesses that soon become shared with their family members. With the heightened transmissibility of the delta variant, the cycle of transmission from adult to child to schoolmate to adult is expected to accelerate.

Vaccines have been proven to arrest that repeating loop. In a recent Bloomberg report, a comparison of data from two states for the month of July was presented:

By increasing the likelihood that these children will become sick, hopefully only mildly so, this will keep them from attending classes after missing so many classes and education since March 2020. Keeping these children healthy will be key to their making up for that lost time.

Similarly, keeping yourself healthy will ultimately support your income stream, whether you don’t have paid personal-time-off benefits or would rather use those paid benefits for vacation rather than as sick days. Having to deal with long haul Covid affects could also impact your career advancement, and ultimately the financial wellbeing of your family. Passing along the virus in the workplace could also affect the financial wellbeing of your company.

A shot now (and a second shot in a few weeks) will likely prevent your passing Covid along to those children under 12 years old who cannot yet (and adult family, friends and co-workers who refuse to) be vaccinated, or for you to receive the virus from them. It is the best way to protect those children who cannot yet be protected by the vaccine. Abel Personnel supports your receiving this vaccination as well as your family members aged 12 and older. So much of a return to normal will depend on your doing that!

I have four precious grandchildren, ages 4 months, 3, 6 and 9 years. They are at risk of contracting COVID without a vaccine available to them. They must rely on others to protect them, their teachers, coaches, everyone in their environment (and all the extended friends and family of those in their environment) to keep them safe. Please do you part for my grandchildren and ALL children, get vaccinated! Debby Abel