There’s a little list of things that Richmond, Texas, mom Vanessa Lui promised her daughter Zoe they could do after the third grader got her COVID-19 vaccine. A visit to Barnes & Noble. An afternoon at the local museum.
Going back to school in person is also on the list, but schoolwork isn’t really what Zoe misses after attending school entirely online for the past year and a half.
“I’ve only been missing my friends, because I don’t really like to do work, it’s sort of annoying,” the 8-year-old told The Texas Tribune in an interview. “Sometimes we played at recess, and we went down the slide.”
That’s why, in November, she was among the first Texas children in her age group to roll up her sleeve and get inoculated against COVID-19, appearing with her mom, her aunt and her cousin at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston after the federal government approved the Pfizer shot for kids ages 5-11.
Since then, 693,345 Texas elementary-age children have received at least one dose of the vaccine, accounting for about 24% of the state’s 2.9 million children ages 5-11 — and a figure in line with the national rate. Nearly 390,000 of the 5-11 group are fully vaccinated, while more than half of Texans ages 12-15 are fully vaccinated.
Texas’ child vaccination rate is higher than in many other Southern states, where rates as low as 10% are being recorded. In the first two weeks after the shot was approved for emergency use in the younger age group, some 100,000 children showed up to Texas school clinics, pharmacies and pediatricians’ offices to get inoculated.
Zoe was among them.
“As a family, we were excited,” Lui said. “We need more parents, rather than less parents, to go first.”
But as the omicron variant of COVID-19 drives up cases beyond anything recorded in Texas during the pandemic, Zoe is still waiting to go back to school. She continues to take her classes online as she and her mother wait until staff members stop calling in sick, causing students to switch teachers and classes often.
With omicron raging through the unvaccinated community, children with COVID-19 are turning up in hospitals and pediatricians’ offices in record numbers.