Germany here. On my premise, I have a shared garden with three households, 3 kids in school (homeschooled every other week), 2 kids in kindergarden. Since we are very very lucky with this configuration (in terms of the kids being able to play with each other in the shared garden and not being stuck indoors all the time), we have had hard rules most of the time and everyone isolated on the premise, while most of the research on covid spreading was going on - this meant no kindergarden, no school, only one other household to meet adults with outdoors, FFP2-masked, with 2m distance.
While most risk factors on spreading are coming to a scientifically viable conclusion, the risks and length of long-term effects of a covid infection are not. Combined with the very low detection rate of covid in children before - which is bound to increase now through the mandated testing twice a week in most of germany - we are still being cautious (we also have people on the premise with preconditions, which are in the mid- to high-risk category for complications from an infection).
So our rules for now:
The idea is to (still) restrict contacts to the same in-group and to minimise any contacts out-group. This works for small groups (our premise) as well as larger groups (premise and our contacts) as long as we hold the contacts accountable to the standard as well. This makes the risk more calculated than having no rules, but obviously more risky than our previous strict rules.
Since it's still unclear, if a two-shot vaccination (where the second shot is extremely important, since it boosts the antibody response by a factor of 20-40x) actually prevents a vaccinated person from being a spreader (with cautiously optimistic scientific finding towards "yes"), we will keep these rules for a little longer and treat vaccinated contacts similar to unvaccinated, until the findings are clearer. Which will hopefully be in the next weeks.
One of the effects of living with others during a pandemic is that risks you take don't just affect yourself. While this is also true even if you live alone, you can't really negotiate with society at large over acceptable levels of risk. When our house decided to lock down a year ago, open up a bit in summer, and lock down again this winter, each needed quite a bit of discussion.
As of today, all the adults in our house have had at least one shot, so we're starting to think about how this should change how we'll handle risk.
We've already updated our approach a little bit: after discussion in February we decided that each week each of us can choose one fully-vaccinated person and spend unrestricted indoor time with them.
Once all the adults are fully vaccinated, though, what someone does outside of the house likely doesn't have much of an effect on risk to the rest of us. The vaccines are very good, decreasing both your chances of getting coronavirus and passing it on if you get it. The risk isn't zero, but our housemates aren't the kind to go to an anti-vax song convention, so I'm not too worried. At that point, what you do outside of the house can go back to being your own decision.
Shared spaces are a bit different. While we haven't decided for sure yet, I think it's probably going to end up being that you can invite anyone in who is fully vaccinated.
There's also the question of how to handle the intermediate stage, when some of us or our friends have had some time since an initial shot but are not yet fully vaccinated. After a couple weeks this is probably pretty safe, but it is hard to tell how much. Since this is only about a month and we've been isolating for over a year we'll probably just wait with some amount of case-by-case (one housemate is going to see their partner when both are 2wk after their first doses), but I'm open to arguments otherwise.
With the kids, risk is very low overall, to the point where if everyone was affected the way children are we wouldn't have even tried to prevent the spread. The baby will be at elevated risk, and I think their main risk will probably be via the older kids, especially when they're in in-person school? Part of the risk to the baby wouldn't be from covid directly, but instead that infant fevers generally require aggressive treatment and covid makes a fever more likely. Overall, I think this means our family is likely to continue socializing outdoors, at least as long as the weather makes that not much of a tradeoff.
Very curious how others are thinking about this.
(We are also lucky to live in a part of the world where we have vaccines for anyone who wants them. Not as lucky as places like South Korea with really solid government response, but still lucky. Very worried for about India right now.)
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