After getting the COVID-19 vaccine, can I see family and friends? - TODAY

Once everyone in a family is vaccinated, experts say that it should be safe for people to gather, but it will be several months before the vaccine is readily available to the general public to vaccinate.

"That would be safe, if everyone in the family has been vaccinated," said Dr.

"I think the issue is it's going to be a long time before we get to the place where all members of a family are vaccinated, especially if it's a multigenerational family with grandparents and little kids and adults.

David Buchholz, the senior founding medical director for primary care at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, said that seeing just a few family members could be safe — for example, if two vaccinated adults visited two fully vaccinated grandparents, that could be relatively safe, but the larger a circle gets, the larger the risk becomes.