Here’s how risky it is to let kids see their grandparents during the pandemic

When it comes to getting sick with COVID-19, you might be thinking about this, and we have been, too. Stephanie Dayton asks: “What is the risk of my kids spending time with their grandparents?”

We asked the experts: Katie Cary, vice president of infection prevention for HCA Continental Division; Dr. Nipunie Rajapakse, a pediatric infectious diseases physician at the Mayo Clinic; and Dr. Irfan N. Hafiz, infectious disease physician and Northwest Region chief medical officer at Northwestern Medicine.

Their take: Contracting COVID-19 from letting the kids see their grandparents is medium risk.

“The reason we’ve been so cautious about recommendations for these groups is because grandparents fall into higher-risk categories of people who are more likely to develop a severe illness or end up in hospital or intensive care if they get infected,” Rajapakse said.

“If they’re not following the social distancing, as it’s harder with children, obviously, but then they could bring an unknowing risk to the grandparents if they for some reason were asymptomatic and positive. They could infect their grandparents,” Cary said.

“If somebody is sick at the house, probably a good idea to stay away. If the grandparents have risks for exposure — probably something to think about there as well. However, if they have been isolating for a while and if they’ve not really been out and they’ve been following directions, I think the risks in those situations are probably really low. You are moving just outside of the nuclear family into the first step of extended family. And that’s probably still a lower-risk group of people,” Hafiz said.

By: Lindsey Theis, Newsy.