Category: Pandemic Diary

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We’ve both gotten our Covid vaccine boosters, and the kid’s had both initial shots now that a dosage has been approved for his age range. No side effects to speak of for either of them, and while I had a day of brain fog, I think that’s just as likely to be because the shoulder I usually sleep on was sore and I couldn’t freaking get to sleep that night.

It’s been interesting to compare the process for each visit, though.

The initial roll-out back in April and May was a long but very efficient queue run by a local health provider, directing patients through the halls of their office to whichever of a dozen rooms was up next.

For the kid’s shots, we went with another local health group that’s been running clinics at local schools after hours for the last few weeks. It was similar, but a lot of the directing was being done by volunteers, and the people administering the shots weren’t staff nurses but drawn from firefighters and the like. They set up check-in tables and partitions and chairs in some of the classrooms, and they made an effort to put the kids at ease. They even had a service dog available for anyone who wanted to hug a dog during their shot. The timing wasn’t as well-arranged, though, and both times we got sent to someone who was still waiting for the next batch of loaded syringes.

For the boosters, we just made appointments at the local CVS pharmacy. It was like getting a flu shot, plus adding the record to the Covid vaccine card.

(Amusing: Between my first and second pass through the scheduler, the CVS website dropped the eligibility question. California had already approved boosters for all adults, but CVS must have had the change ready to go as soon as the CDC’s approval came through. Of course I still had to enter all the same insurance information both times.)

So we’re all up to date on the best biological protection against Covid available!

Just in time to find out whether and how much Omicron can get around it. *sigh*

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I could not believe how many kids were out trick-or-treating in our neighborhood this year. Or how many households were handing out candy. There were more kids even than a normal Halloween, through fewer houses active than usual.

We weren’t even sure of our plans as late as Sunday afternoon. We’d carved pumpkins on Saturday, we’d put the skeleton in the big hole in the floor (not that anyone but us could see it), but we weren’t sure whether we’d be taking the kid trick-or-treating, or whether anyone would be knocking on our door.

Toward the end of the afternoon we set up a table on the front lawn with our jack-o-lanterns and two trays of goodies (one candy, one party favors as an allergy-friendly alternative). We put on masks as a precaution, and took turns taking the kid trick-or-treating.

We ran out of candy.

We ran out of toys.

There were so many groups of kids, some as big as a dozen, and they kept coming for several hours after sunset.

I figure it’s probably a reaction to last year’s locked-down holiday.

Covid-19 hasn’t gone away. The pandemic isn’t anywhere near over. But cases in Los Angeles County have been trending downward from a peak way back in August, and our area has around 80% vaccination coverage among those 12 and up. Schools have gone back to in-person instruction, with masks indoors, distancing guidelines, and quarantine rules for students and staff who are exposed. The elementary schools even brought back their Halloween parade, though they split it by age group and only allowed staff and students onsite to reduce crowding.

The coronavirus isn’t gone. It’s still a constant presence. But for the moment, it feels more manageable than this time last year. At least here.

So people handed out candy, and kids went trick-or-treating, and parents went along with them. Maybe a third were wearing masks.

But we’re getting tested later this week, just in case. Outdoors or not, it was still a crowd.

Update: We didn’t catch Covid from trick-or-treating! (or from the plumbers for that matter)

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Remember last year when it was virtually impossible to get hand sanitizer? You couldn’t order it online, you couldn’t order it for an in-store pickup, and stores that had it were limiting how many of those tiny bottles each customer could buy? Breweries and distilleries were stepping in to supplement the supply, but it still wasn’t enough.

I mean, I don’t like to leave my camera visible in the car when I park, but for a while, I was more worried about leaving a two-ounce bottle of hand sanitizer where it could be seen.

Heck, when I found an 8-ounce bottle at Target in May 2020, I snapped a photo to send it home!

Holding a bottle of hand sanitizer in front of a store shelf with a sign saying that customers are limited to one bottle each due to high demand.

Times have changed.

Factory lines got up to speed after a few months. We bought extra to make sure we wouldn’t run out. Then we learned that Covid spreads more by sharing air than by touching surfaces. And a third of the population convinced themselves it wasn’t a problem, while half to two thirds of the population have gotten at least partly vaccinated against it. And after a year with multiple waves of cases, the rates are currently waaaaaay down in California.

And we’re all so tired of it all.

And we don’t need as much hand sanitizer as we thought we were going to a year ago.

This is the same store this week. Four rolling shelf units and at least one section of the wall shelving. Full.

Shelves and shelves and rolling carts full of hand sanitizer bottles.

So, um, anybody want to buy some hand sanitizer?

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We’ve both received the second dose of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine! Same location and keep-you-moving procedure as the first dose, in and out within a half hour.

Scan from the manga Cells at Work showing a man in a White Blood Cell cap shouting "Antigen sighted!" and violently slashing something with a knife.

Like many people seem to, we got stronger side effects after the second dose than the first. She got fatigue and a fever, I also got loopiness, chills, and a headache. I imagined my immune system looking at the new batch of spike proteins, saying, “What, this again? That’s it, let’s bring out the big guns and make sure it Never. Comes. Back.”

Oh, and my brain decided to launch into a migraine aura around the time the chills hit, but I don’t think that was related. 🤷

But both of us were mostly recovered within 24 hours and back to normal within 48. (Well, my arm’s still sore, but I don’t really count that.) And a day or two of mild “illness” that you can schedule and you know won’t kill you is a heck of a lot better than a surprise attack by the actual coronavirus making you spend weeks in bed with the option of a hospital stay, chronic illness, or dying gasping for breath, watching your loved ones say goodbye to you over video chat because they can’t visit you in person safely.

And passing it along to someone else before you even know you’ve been infected, so they have to go through it all too.

The cost/benefit analysis is pretty clear.

Still a couple of weeks to go for our systems to completely lock in on it, but we should be able to relax a bit around the end of the month.

That would certainly be nice!

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We have both gotten the first dose of the Moderna vaccine against Covid!

*whew!*

The kid can’t get vaccinated until the <16 safety and efficacy data comes back, but he’s still young enough that he’s at a lot less risk to begin with, and having all the adults around him vaccinated will let us all get a lot closer to “normal” life outside the home soon. (Whatever “normal” is these days.)

Smooth Scheduling (No, Really!)

After hearing horror stories from people in earlier tiers and different states, I was really expecting to have trouble setting up appointments. I figured it was going to be like trying to get tickets for Comic-Con. Or worse: like trying to get a hotel room for Comic-Con. Broken websites, or only finding appointments three weeks out, or only finding appointments on the other side of the county, or starting to schedule an appointment and having it disappear in the middle of registering. I bookmarked all the pharmacy Covid-19 pages ahead of time just in case the state or county websites crashed and burned.

Fortunately we were both in UCLA Health’s system, because they’re running a well-oiled machine.

The day before general eligibility opened up, just as I was starting to freak out about how long it would take to get appointments, UCLA Health sent out an email to their patients saying to just schedule an appointment through MyChart. We picked the nearest location (about half an hour away), she got an appointment for the first day, and I got one for a few days later.

We could have scheduled for the same time, but we wanted to stagger our shots just in case we both got knocked out by side effects. Gotta have at least one functional adult around!

Getting (the) Shot

The location we both went to is a regular medical office, not a megasite. They don’t have outdoor lines or giant waiting areas, and they don’t have separate entrances and exits, and the hallways are kind of squirrely. But they minimize bottlenecks and keep you moving quickly so you aren’t sharing airspace with anyone for longer than a couple of minutes.

  1. They screen everyone on the way in with the usual symptom questions and a temperature check.
  2. When someone’s ready at the front office, they send you in to check your ID, confirm whether you’re there for the first or second dose, hand you the information sheets and send you down the hallway.
  3. At each intersection, they have someone to direct you through the maze until you reach an exam room.
  4. One person is waiting for you in the exam room. They double check your name and which dose you’re there for, then give you the shot and the CDC-issued paper card indicating which vaccine you received and when it was.
  5. Then they send you down another hall where someone directs you to one of the chairs scattered throughout the halls to wait out the 15 minutes.
  6. Rather than try to keep track of everyone, they just ask you to set a 15-minute timer on your phone and you can leave if you’re still feeling OK at the end.
  7. They also ask if you have the MyChart app on your phone. If you do, you can sign in and there’s already a button to schedule your follow-up for the second dose. If not, or if you run into problems with the app, they’ll schedule it for you.

The whole process is fast. Each of us was in and out within half an hour. Including parking the car.

Side Effects

The shot itself was relatively painless, but we both developed sore arms after a couple of hours. More than a flu shot, less than a tetanus shot. Mine cleared up after two days, while Katie’s lasted a little longer. We also both experienced fatigue starting around the same time as the soreness. Hers was milder — she described it as more just wanting to be left alone than actually being tired — but I was wiped out for the evening and most of the next day.

A bit unpleasant, sure, but nowhere near as bad (or as long) as actually getting Covid-19!

With any luck the second dose will go as smoothly. Update: The process was smooth, but the side effects were stronger.

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I’ve gone through or seen four different Covid-19 testing procedures over the past year, not counting the ones I’ve only read about. (You remember, the early days of the pandemic when they were still trying to make enough tests, and weren’t sure just how easily transmissible it was, so they had people wearing haz-mat suits and passing the test kit to the patient on the end of a long pole.)

The first Covid-19 test I took was in July 2020. I was coughing and registered a fever, so I went to an urgent care. Masks and distancing were standard by then. I signed in at the door, then waited in the car until they called me on my phone. They led me into one of the exam rooms, asked me the screening questions, then handed me a nasal swab to administer it myself.

The second Covid-19 test I took, at the end of September, was in the emergency room. I was there for an unrelated health problem, but if you’ve got someone who’s going to be in the ER for a while (and let’s be honest, if you have to go to the ER, you’re going to be there for a while), you have to check. They basically just stuck the cotton swab up my nose while I was sitting on a gurney in the hallway. To be fair, I was pretty out of it by that point.

The third Covid-19 test I took was at a drive-through pharmacy window. I didn’t have any symptoms, but I’d been potentially exposed. I made an appointment ahead of time and drove up to the window. This was the kind of window with an extending drawer that they normally use to trade your payment for your medication. They passed a plastic bin out with the swab kit, instructions, and a collection vial. I did the swab myself, put it in the vial, then put the vial back in the bin to return it.

The fourth test isn’t one I took myself, but I was at an urgent care last week for another issue and got to see how they were handling it. They were screening everyone at the door to the building. If you were there for Covid-19 testing, you wouldn’t even set foot in the building. You’d wait on the sidewalk or in your car, and when they were ready, a nurse would come out and meet you with the test kit. I don’t know whether the nurses or patients were performing the nasal swab, but I thought doing it all outside (this is Southern California in spring, so YMMV) was a good way to minimize transmission.