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.
Hold the Line—CoronaLife Day 376
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.