COVID personal reactions, psychology of covid, psychoanalysis of covid, chronicles of the pandemic.
Our enthusiastic governor has discontinued mask wearing for “those who
are not vaccinated”. He has also tried to
encourage those who have not been vaccinated with a “vax- a- million” campaign
where, if you are vaccinated, you can enter your name in a lottery to win a
million dollars. Of the three winners so
far, one of them seems to have been convinced to get vaccinated by the
campaign.
Both opening up and the vax-a-million campaign seem to me to
be nakedly aimed at the electorate who will be deciding whether to put the
governor back in office. After a year and
a half of making decisions based on health data – decisions that have led the
legislature, which is dominated by his own party, to threaten impeachment and
to try to curtail his power, he appears to have caved. At least so far, this seems to be consistent
with the numbers that are declining and that look quite good - better than we could have expected. We will see
in a month whether all those unmasked hordes at the baseball game on Tuesday's "re-opening night" were attending a super-spreader event.
Yesterday, the reluctant wife and I went grocery shopping together
for the first time in a long time.
Though we were masked, we ran into people at the supermarket who were not for the
first time in over a year. We also did
not have to stand in line to go into the store.
I know the mask is not a protective shield. It protects those around me who, presumably,
are at low risk because I am vaccinated, but I feel naked and unprotected
without it.
Last night we had our first dinner guests in over a
year. Continuing our experience of the
year, we ordered in from our new favorite Taco place. When I ran to the place and picked up the
order with my mask on, about half of the staff were wearing them, though they
were decidedly casual about how much of their face was covered.
We had eaten outdoors with our guests when it was quite cold
earlier in the year, but this was our first time seeing them inside. We compared notes about where we
secured our once a week eating-in meals during the pandemic, and we agreed that the better
restaurants did not do take out well.
Our own cooking was better than high end joints’ take out. Asian restaurants – across a wide variety,
and a very local Lebanese restaurant, as well as pizza joints and Italian
restaurants presented the most reliable delivery/take out options.
This morning, we met some friends passing through town for breakfast, and it was the first time we had been served in a restaurant in a year. It felt oddly decadent – I wanted to thank the wait staff who served me much more frequently than is socially acceptable. I wanted to say - "No, I can get that."
There has been a lot of
concern about the food service industry surviving – on the corporate and the
individual level. Our servers were
middle aged – not kids doing summer work.
This is their adult job. The
restaurant was full and the service seemed slower than it likely would have
been – perhaps they were a little understaffed.
They were also rushing to meet the needs of the restaurant so we didn’t
chit-chat about their experience of being back at work – but I think I was also
self-conscious about talking to someone who didn’t have a mask on whose
vaccination status I did not know. It also felt like being a tourist and asking the locals about what it was like to live in this location.
As I near the end of this rather brief report, I am noticing
that I continue to be a Nervous Nelly. I
can cite figures that support the reasons for this. 95% Effective means that five per cent of
those who were in the trials and practicing
social distancing and being around people wearing masks when not distancing, and came down with COVID had been vaccinated. I have an
innate disregard for low probability events.
OK. I admit it. I signed up for the vax-a-million
lottery. Will I win it? I won’t say no, even though there are fewer
and fewer drawings left… And I have an
even higher aversion to low probability events with a bad consequence. Maybe that comes, in part, from having
treated people with low probably disorders throughout my adult life. Not likely to happen, but when it does, you
don’t want to have it. And COVID is one
of those things I don’t want to have.
Mostly right now I am struggling to stay ahead of my
readings for the summer class I am teaching (It is a small virtual class that
is going well – though the amount of reading assigned is ridiculous – who did
that?). I am looking forward to having a
group of people in our home next week to celebrate my reluctant son’s
graduation from college. They will all
be family and they will all be vaccinated, and it will be great to be together
again and to be having something to celebrate together – and eat together – and
be together.
It is odd, I guess, that this coming celebratory moment seems so natural and so
expected. There is a sense of surreality
that the last year has happened at all.
There is also the strange belief that it isn’t over yet. That the
Europeans will prove much smarter than us, and, by opening up prematurely, we
will cook up all sorts of nasty variants that will make the problem worse. And the advertisements that feature people in
masks already seem dated. Because this is over, isn’t it?
Oh, what strange times we live in….
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