coronavirus pandemic Archives - Page 2 of 5

Just Keep Swimming—CoronaLife Day 439

May 27, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I am now fully vaccinated, so I have ventured to places I have not been for a while. I spent 3 hours clothes shopping for my daughter last week (we won’t discuss how much I hate clothes shopping), and I also went inside the library for the first time in over a year!

My child, however, is not old enough to be vaccinated, so we still have to be careful where she is concerned. After much consideration of transmission rates in our state and area, and seeing the case rates falling, we have decided to let her go back to swimming classes at her pool. A tiny step toward normalcy.

This week was her first week back, and seeing her in the water (and rocking the breast stroke) was heart-warming. She was nervous about going back, being around so many people. But it was good for her, physically and mentally. It will help ease her into next school year, when she will be back in the classroom.

These small moves to normality are encouraging, and welcome, but we are not quite at the end of the tunnel yet. Caution and respect are still needed. We are almost there—just keep swimming.

A Year in Flux—CoronaLife Day 404

April 22, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Last year was the year things stood still. The pandemic brought life as we know it to a screeching halt. Even though essential life functions went on, everything felt like it just…stopped.

This year is a different year. It is a year of flux. Life is changing, the world is changing. As we move back toward a more normal life, everything feels in motion.

We need to take time to look at what we want to go back to, though. The pandemic, the year of slowing down, has changed the way many see the world. Some people really like working from home, wasting less time commuting, spending more time with family. Some businesses are seeing the value of people working from home, and thinking about changing their business models. Many of us realized the value of the family and friends we were cut off from for so long. Many people’s priorities shifted, because it is true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

The pandemic gave us a chance to really look at the world we live in. It highlighted so many things that need to be addressed. Workers deemed “essential” who don’t make enough to pay their bills. Decades of medical inequity that left minority populations exponentially more vulnerable to the virus. Income inequity that allowed the better off to stay safely home while the poor exposed themselves to the virus every day. A rise in violence against Jewish people, and Asian-Americans, and Blacks—some done by the very people supposed to protect our communities. The mental health crisis that is deep in our culture and that is exploding with the pandemic stress.

Some things that used to be “normal” should never be normal again.

Normal didn’t work for so many people in our society. We have a chance now to do better, be better. To build a society that truly reaches for the ideals America was built on. As we rebuild from the pandemic, we need to figure out what parts of the old society are worth saving—and what parts we want to build from scratch.

This pandemic showed in glaring spotlight that a large portion of our nation does not understand social responsibility. They do not understand that with freedom comes responsibility, that individualism does not mean ignoring the needs of others as long as you’ve got yours. Like it or not, we are all connected—what we do impacts others. The pandemic showed us that, too.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Let us strive, in this year of flux, to make sure that as we rise from this pandemic, we leave no one behind.

A Bit of Normalcy–CoronaLife Day 383

April 1, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

The coronavirus pandemic turned a lot of things upside down, and made everyday activities fraught with danger. Now that the vaccines are here, we can look ahead to a time where normalcy inches its way back into our lives. Today, I went to visit my parents for the first time since October.

I have not driven for so long, nor on a high speed road, since then, and it was strangely exhausting. It didn’t help that it was raining and the traffic was heavy with tractor-trailers.

Because of the rain, we met inside the house—the first time I have been inside their house since the pandemic started last March. All previous visits were outside.

Because we were inside, we all remained masked, except when eating, and that we did 6 feet apart with the porch door open for ventilation.

What will it feel like to be normal again?

To hop in the car and drive wherever, whenever?

To enter other people’s houses without precautions?

To see each other’s faces?

We have forgotten so much. It will be an adjustment to find our way back.

We still have a long way to go, before normalcy becomes, well…normal again. My parents both had their second shot, but are not yet two weeks past to full immunity (my daughter and I got tested before going over). I am not yet eligible in my state, but hopefully by May. My daughter will likely not be eligible until the end of the year. So it will be a long time yet before I can breathe easier about my family. Before we can all be immunized and gather without precautions.

Meanwhile, case numbers are rising again, this time among the younger people who are now starting to fill our hospital beds. I know they, and the rest of us, are tired of the precautions, but now is not the time to let down our guard. We are in the final minutes of the game, and the score is tied. We must keep up our defense until we regain possession of the ball. Then we can slam it home for the final victory.

We must continue to hold the line.

Hold the Line—CoronaLife Day 376

March 25, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Sometimes in life you can feel change coming. It comes slowly, inching along…until all of a sudden it flips, and it’s like you are rolling downhill. I feel rather like that with this virus right now. We have a vaccine, people are taking it…but I’m not seeing any effect.

Case rates are at best plateaued where I live, at worst climbing a bit. We are at a transmission rate of 1.09, when we need to be below one, ideally closer to 0.8. We have gotten a second case of Covid in our school (thankfully only 2 since all this began), just as we are all hoping for things to get better. I feel that we are at a tipping point…but I’m not sure which way we will fall.

Honestly, I was hoping to see a greater impact from the vaccinations at this point. And maybe that’s just me not understanding how this all works. Maybe the plateau is because of the vaccines. I was hoping, though, to see a steady decrease in cases as the vaccination rate went up.

Now, the vaccines were not tested to see if they stopped transmission, and with the new variants that are more contagious, maybe the transmission rate is higher than expected. The vaccines WERE intended to decrease hospitalizations and deaths, but both of those are lagging indicators, and I don’t expect to see impact from them for a while.

But I also feel like people have given up, have stopped taking precautions. Like, “The vaccine is here, and so is spring, so let’s just pretend everything is normal.” And that might be one reason why the cases aren’t going down.

We need to hold the line.

I know people are sick of it. I am sick of it, exhausted of the precautions and the remote learning and not seeing my parents often. I get it. We’re tired and we’re fed up.

But we need to hold the line—just for a few more weeks.

We are at the tipping point in this fight. But the vaccines aren’t a cure-all, they were never meant to be a silver bullet, and we all still have to do our part. Even after we’re vaccinated. If we can hold the line just a little longer, we will tip this thing in our favor.

For all that lots of people are being vaccinated, many of us aren’t eligible yet. I won’t be for possibly another month or more. And none of our kids are, and probably won’t be until fall.

So please, for me, for my kid, hold the line just a little longer. Wear the mask. Keep the distance. Stay home as much as possible. The longer people ignore the precautions, the longer the end of this will take to arrive.

We’re so close.

Just hold the line.

New Starts—CoronaLife Day 362

March 11, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

It is coming up on a year of coronalife for me. I started counting the day my daughter’s school shut. Other people have slightly different timelines. But about a year ago, life drastically changed for all of us.

This week, as well as marking the end of an incredibly long year, has also seen some new starts. The weather where I live has been warm, with a breath of spring on the air. Daffodils and crocuses are blooming, and people are wearing light coats or even none at all. It is much easier to take a walk when not trussed up like a sausage.

I am helping an adopted friend find her bio family. We have determined her mother, and are close to finding her father. So that, too, is a new start. A new family, and a new journey of getting to know who she is, who they are, and who they may be together.

My mother retired in January, and lamented the loss of her work laptop. So my brother’s family and mine bought her a new one as a retirement gift. I have spent many hours already on the phone helping her get it set up, since the virus means I can’t just pop over there this weekend to do it myself. (Me being tech support is not new, LOL.)

A year into pandemic life, there is finally something new in the air: hope. People are getting vaccinated. My folks have gotten their first shots. My husband just got his second. 10% of my state are fully vaccinated, with another nearly 10% having gotten their first dose. While the need for precautions is just as strong as ever, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.

So this week has seen many a new start. I hope to build on these fresh starts to find a new way forward this year, and build a more productive and less stressed life. My greatest wish would be for my creativity to come back. The anxiety and demands of coronalife crushed it. As the weather warms and we begin breathing easier, maybe it will come back

That is the new start I long to see.

Marching On—CoronLife Day 355

March 4, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

It is hard to believe we are in March of 2021 already. It is also hard to believe we are approaching a year of the pandemic. Some people have already marked the first year, depending what their marker is. For me, it is the week the schools closed in March. That’s when my family’s world shifted.

My daughter was home every day. My husband switched to working from home. I had to figure out how to snag a spot for grocery pickup (it was as bad as trying to get a vaccine appointment for a while). Everything stopped, but at the same time the change was moving at lightspeed. Life became disorienting and stressful, with even minor things that had been on autopilot now taking a great deal of conscious thought.

Now we are about a year in. Vigilance is still necessary, but we have learned. We have learned what activities are safe, what risks we are willing to take (this differs from person to person), what precautions to ingrain in our habits. Will I ever be able to feel comfortable standing closer than 6 feet from someone again? How weird will it be to someday be able to leave the masks at home, gathering dust in a drawer?

The stress has morphed throughout the year. It started as near-panic, and the steep learning curve of living in our new reality. As we got used to working from home, learning from home, shopping from home, zooming from home, the stress became a steady thrum of “stay safe” in the background of our lives. We learned to deal with too much togetherness and too little emotional and mental space. Creatives either saw their Muses flourish, or saw them flee (mine fled). And losing one’s creative outlet is another kind of stress.

Finally, we are at the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and the stress has shifted again. Now the scarcity of vaccines is causing stress as people scramble to get their loved ones protected. We spend hours on sites trying to snag appointments that disappear as fast as concert tickets on Ticketmaster. And we brace ourselves against pandemic fatigue, the very real desire to just toss all precautions to the wind and forget for a while.

But we cannot let down our guard. The pandemic is not over, it is not done, and it will find those moments of forgetfulness and gleefully infect a new batch of people—perhaps creating a new and deadlier variant in the process. We must stand strong for a while longer. Just a few more months, then we can perhaps breathe easier without worrying what respiratory droplets we are breathing in. We will not achieve full return to normalcy in a few months, but we should be much closer. We should be in the middle of the end of the pandemic.

So in the meantime, I am simply marching on. I am distracting myself with my genealogy work. Today I have spent a long time with 9th- to 11th-century Norwegian Jarls of Orkney and the Norse Dukes of Normandy. All I can say is that with all the fighting warring, and raiding everyone did back then, it’s a wonder any of us are here at all.

So as I march with them into their next battle, I urge us all not to give up our current battle. The vaccine cavalry, with all its delivery flaws, has arrived, but the war is far from won. Stay strategic. Stay strong. Stay safe.

I want all of us to be here a year from now, when the end of the end of this pandemic will be behind us.

Stress Test—CoronaLife 341

February 18, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I took my first cardiac stress test today. For those who have never had one, you walk on a treadmill. It’s slow at first, then gets faster and the incline gets steeper, all to push your heart rate up while you are being monitored so the doctors can look for abnormalities in your heart function.

I didn’t die. And nothing abnormal was found (as expected).

I got to thinking, though, that this entire last year has been a stress test. The building racial inequality crisis, the unrelenting nature of a pandemic, the political divisions ending in violence in Washington. If all that isn’t stressful, I don’t know what it.

This thought was reinforced as I sat in the waiting room while the doctor looked at my results. Three older people, all in their 70s, were there with me. They were talking amongst themselves, socially distanced, masked. And one of them says, “I really don’t know what’s going to happen. Back in the day, there was stability. Now…nobody knows what’s going to happen.” The others agreed with him.

I agreed with him.

All this chaos, all this hardship, all this upheaval…it’s bringing in something new. A new world. There is no guarantee it will be a better world than the old. I don’t worry for myself so much. I am 50 years old; I can handle what comes my way. I worry for my daughter. She has already had a year of her childhood stolen from her. How will the continuing spasms of change warp the remainder of her childhood? What sort of a world will she step into as an adult?

We are all in a stress test.

And the results are going to determine the future of America, the world, and my daughter.

We need to get the diagnosis and treatment right.

RIP Uncle Gary – CoronaLife Day 299

January 7, 2021 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

We lost my Uncle Gary to COVID a few days ago. My aunt and uncle were hospitalized with it December 21st. The first few days seemed like they both were making progress. Then my uncle took a turn for the worse, and the deterioration was swift. Due to COVID restrictions, his family could not be at his side as he passed, an additional burden to the grief they bear.

Most of my memories of my Uncle Gary are from my childhood, before their family moved farther away and we didn’t see them very much. As a result, the memories are rather vague. I remember him as a dark-haired man with twinkling eyes behind his glasses, and I always seem to remember him smiling or laughing.

He could be warm, but he was also a private man, so I suppose it is not surprising that I did not know him very well as an adult, combined with all the time living farther away. He was a Vietnam veteran, and like many of those soldiers, I suspect the war never quite left him. Although proud of his service, I always have trouble picturing him as a soldier, because I always felt he had a gentle soul.

Like me, he was interested in genealogy, although of course his family was not mine (his wife is my blood relative). His line was German, and he read and spoke German well. My line is also German and when I ran into a document that needed translating, he helped me out.

When the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11, he walked for miles from his job in locked-down central DC until he could find transportation home–a now white-haired man just wanting to get home to the family he loved.

And he did deeply love his family. That was always crystal clear. His wife, his sons, and his grandson meant the world to him. They will miss him more than words can say.

The virus stole another soul this week, and we mourn his loss. Godspeed, Uncle Gary.

And The Stockings Were Hung—CoronaLife Day 285

December 24, 2020 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

You are reading this on Christmas Eve, but I wrote it on Christmas Eve Eve. We are rolling into the holiday, and for once I am actually on top of things. Well, my Christmas cards only just arrived today, so they will not go out until after Christmas, but it’s actually pretty normal for me to not have them go out before Christmas, so I’m not concerned. I figure it just helps extend the Christmas season, LOL.

The presents are wrapped and under the tree. Our little family is tucked in tight against the coronavirus. Our Christmas dinner is in the fridge waiting to be cooked. Cookies will be made sometime on Christmas Eve.

We got to see the great conjunction tonight. A few days past its prime, but we had clouds the last two nights. We got out the binoculars and the telescope and saw the pretty sight until a bank of clouds rolled over them. But I am content that we saw it, even for a short time. There is a beauty in the dance of the stars that removes you from the cares of this world.

Christmas is my favorite holiday, and even this year I am feeling a bit of peace. I often stop and admire the tree, which I think we got just right this year. My family, although not all together, is all healthy and safe. My mom-in-law has been with us since before Thanksgiving so we could all celebrate together safely. And we have been incredibly lucky to escape the economic fallout of this pandemic, as we had the ability to work from home.

2020 has not been kind to a lot of people, and my Christmas wish is for them to find peace and the help they need to get back on their feet. To those grieving a lost loved one, I hope they find comfort. And I hope all of us find a truly happier, healthier year in 2021.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to all.

The Aquarium Wars Continue—CoronaLife Day 264

December 3, 2020 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

It’s been a pretty quiet week following our unusually quiet Thanksgiving. My main excitement—and one I could do without—was a resumption of my fighting ammonia spikes in our aquarium.

We have one fish. One puny little 2-inch fish. Little orange guppy named Zippy. He has proven to be pretty hardy, having survived the initial ammonia spike starting November 8th, when we got him and two others. His two tank mates died from a combination of the ammonia and a mouth fungus. But Zippy survived.

Our tank settled for a while, but the ammonia continued to creep up too high every day. For a while it would go up to 0.5, and I would change out the water and put in chemicals. I even installed a new sponge filter with air pump to increase filtration, which will hopefully bring the ammonia under control once it gets established.

Instead, the ammonia went crazy (coincidentally, not to do with the new filter). Spiking up to 1.0 every few hours. The recommended way to remove excess ammonia is to change out some water. At one point I changed out 6 gallons of water a day—and we only have a 5-gallon tank! This could not go on.

Upon advice from an author friend who is also an experienced aquarium person, I did what felt counter-intuitive. I stopped changing out the water. My friend said changing out so much water might have “broken” the bio filer cycle, because while it gets ammonia out, it also removes the good bacteria that eats the ammonia. So she said to leave the water but bomb it with nitrifying bacteria (“good bacteria”). Put in many times the recommended amount. So at my daughter’s bedtime, I changed out half the water in the tank and then I poured in 4 capfuls of the bacteria (and a capful of the ammonia detoxifier). Four hours later, when I went to bed, I put in another capful of ammonia detoxifier and another 4 capfuls of the bacteria. Then I went to bed and hoped Zippy would still be alive in the morning.

Zippy almost gave me a heart attack in the morning, because I couldn’t find him in the tank. Often that means they died and are laying on the bottom somewhere, obscured by gravel, shells, etc. But I found him eventually, hiding half-asleep behind his favorite plant. Whew!

I tested the water, fearful the ammonia would be sky-high. Instead it was 0.25—normal for my tank (although it should be 0, but never has been in 3 years). I could hardly believe it. I tested the water every 2 hours the rest of the day, and so far it has stayed at 0.25. I did add more bacteria and more ammonia detoxifier a few times through the day.

So, fingers crossed the ammonia stays stable. Poor Zippy has been through a lot, and frankly I am shocked he is not dead. It would be nice if he could just enjoy his tank without my constant intrusions for a while. And our water bill will be much lower!

So how have you spent this week that transitions us into December?

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