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Let's talk about COVID-19 vaccination. Have you and/or those you know been vaccinated -- or had difficulty getting vaccinated? If so, talk about that.
A few weeks ago my grandma got vaccinated, my Mom drove her to the drive-in vaccination site, and I tagged along. The vaccination site was actually the airstrip at Pratt and Whitney! It was right next to Rentschler Field, so we all joked that we were taking Grandma to a football game. Once we got there, the site was packed full of people. There had to he hundreds of cars, and the staff there was a mix of what appeared to be healthcare professionals, DOT people, and members of the U.S Army dressed in camo. We stopped in a holding area which was pretty muddy, and we listened to instructions on the radio. There was actually a car that was stuck in the mud in the first area, and needed to be pushed out by the workers. After waiting for about 30 minutes in that first area, we were redirected to another line, which is shown in the photo. Grandma even had an appointment, but by the time she got her vaccine and we left, we had been there for over 2 hours. Being able to talk with Grandma and my Mom made the time go by a bit faster, and Grandma was relieved that we were there to go with her. With the huge wait time and the army men being there, Operation Warp Speed felt like Operation Slow Speed.
March 8, 2021
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Talk about what you think the world will be like after the pandemic is over.
I don’t think that there’s a chance in hell that things will go back to the way they used to be before the pandemic. I think that it’s a little naive to think so, especially right after the pandemic is over. I think that we’ll still be wearing masks, although I’m not sure how tightly enforced that rule will be once all of us are vaccinated. I think that the culture surrounding masks will remain though - if we see someone not wearing a mask in a business, we might go “damn, look at that idiot not wearing a mask”. On the other hand, we’ll probably see others wearing their masks, and think “oh, how responsible and empathetic of them”. But I don’t think that we’ll ever go back to seeing the same meaning assigned to masks ever again. I also think that everybody will still be weird about physical contact - we went so long without it, or without any form of it, that its recurrence might throw us off a little. When I look back at videos and pictures from things pre-pandemic, I’m just thinking to myself, “wow, we really used to live like that, and it wasn’t life-threatening”, you know what I mean? Like, there’s a video in my snapchat memories of my friend in the hallway chaos that was passing time in high school, and she’s just getting swallowed by the amount of people that were flooding the hallways. There are pictures of all of us close together, without masks on, inside businesses. Even parties - I’m just in a room full of kids that I barely know, have no idea where they’ve been or who else they’ve been with, and before the pandemic, that wouldn’t have mattered, but now it does, and it’s weird to think that there was a period of time where it really did matter at all. I’m pretty sure that we’re all going to try our hardest to make the world like it was before, but I think that’s impossible, given the impact of the pandemic. There will always be vestiges of it in our world, little reminders of this time in our society.
April 21, 2021