by Becca Shaw Glaser November 2, 2021 The Free Press

Are we done yet? Is it over? Did we survive? Nationally, globally, millions of
us did not. Can we go back to our normal worries like crying about the
heating climate, the kind of world our children are going to live in and how
we’re passing the problems onto them; how we’re tired, strung out,
exhausted?

Mostly I haven’t gone anywhere. I stay home alone. I work outside landscaping. I wear masks in stores. Even though I got vaccinated in April I haven’t eaten inside at a restaurant these past 20 months. Getting the vaccine was euphoric, but then Delta was scary, reports of breakthrough infections are scary, the whole thing has been so scary. It’s never been that I was really worried about getting COVID myself; my fears have been about giving it to people I love, and to people I’ve never met.

A few weeks ago I started making a plan to visit some friends I hadn’t seen all pandemic. I especially wanted to see one of my best friends and her 9-year-old, Q, because kids change fast, and after too long, they don’t remember you. I didn’t reserve a hotel room until the last minute because Q got sick so I had to wait for her COVID test results; hooray when it turned out to be just an old-fashioned cold. So then I was off on my trip. I went to Portsmouth, where the unmasked hotel manager checked me in. You wouldn’t have even known it was pandemic-times except that the usual corporate hotel breakfast smorgasbord of boxed eggs, oily sausage and fake maple syrup was replaced with plastic-wrapped “muffins” and small bottled waters being doled out behind the check-in counter.

In the Catskills with my friends I had a great time. We ate inside unmasked
together, pizza, Reubens, broccoli soup. We squeezed onto a couch and watched the new “Baby-Sitter’s Club” series and some horse cartoons while the puppy gnawed a cow’s leg bone. Q and I painted each other’s nails with non-toxic kid nail polish, the kind that pretty much peels off in the shower.

My last night there, I tried out my first Binax NOW antigen test to have a sense of my COVID status before heading to New York City to stay with a dear, immune suppressed friend. The antigen tests aren’t as reliable as PCR, but I can’t resist a super sale ($14 for a box of two tests at Walmart), and our hero, Dr. Shah, had recently advised Mainers to keep some tests at home. I stuck the long white swab up my nostril, twisted hard for 15 seconds, then did the other one. I placed it in the little cardboard thing after squeezing precisely six drops of a toxic liquid in and waited. Negative.

Nothing about this was safe. Driving wasn’t safe. Leaving home wasn’t safe. Seeing my friends indoors, especially kids who couldn’t yet be vaccinated, wasn’t 100% safe. But how long can this continue, living in this state of lack and fear? Plus, I’m vaccinated now and what’s the point of acting like things are just as dangerous as they were pre-vaccine?

I had a great time in New York City, too. I remarked to a good friend there that I’ve been so impressed with New York City’s mask and vaccine messaging — friendly, direct, community oriented — and its other pandemic initiatives. I told her that a friend and I had been delighted that the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens required proof of vaccination for entry into indoor places, and that it didn’t seem like that would go over so well in Maine. She said, “I think we just all have PTSD after hearing ambulances go by all the time. So it’s easier to get people on board here.”

One friendly-looking cartoonish sign from the MTA on the subway: “You still have to wear a mask, indoors, onboard, even if you’re vaccinated. Thanks for wearing your mask.” At a few subway stops you can get vaccinated and be given a weeklong Unlimited MetroCard. I went to Union Square; there was a free outdoor
COVID testing pop-up tent next to a guy doing a puppet show, next to the farmers market packing up for the day, next to someone chalking large “bad energy spot/good energy spot” circles, next to white kids playing chess with older Black men, next to teen skateboarders being filmed skating, next to tourists, next to giant bronze sculptures of the heads of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and John Lewis. They were glinting in the setting sun and I got teary-eyed by all of it; I think a lot of people were teary-eyed. It felt like a new version of New York, vivid, vibrant, chatty, sorrowful, powerful, political, like everybody’s stereotype of San Francisco in the ’60s, the stench of weed everywhere, less corporatized and sterile than it’s been for the past 20 or so years, not perfect by any means, but absolutely glorious. My friend said, yes, everyone’s been living their lives much
more outside during COVID.

On the trip I asked people how they decide what level of risks to take. A nurse friend who lives in a conservative part of New York state has gone to indoor restaurants a few times. She told me that one of her very favorite patients didn’t believe in COVID; in his hospital bed, unvaccinated, dying of COVID, he didn’t believe he had it; up to the moment he died he still thought it was a sham. One of my New York City friends said, “I decided this is life. I have to live my life. I will probably be wearing masks for the rest of my life.” Another friend says she pays attention to the transmission rate per infected person; when it goes below a certain level, she will eat out.

On the morning I got back to Maine, I got a text from Q’s mom that Q had just tested positive on two different antigen tests, and that they were waiting on PCR test results. I had planned to take a test on my return anyway, but now I wanted to do it as soon as possible. I hadn’t seen Q for seven days at that point, which meant many things were possible. Could I have gotten asymptomatic COVID there and then infected the various friends I visited with and stayed within the city? Or was it possible that she wasn’t contagious until after I saw her? Or had the vaccine worked and protected me despite us spending many unmasked indoor hours together? I texted my New York friends right away. Though the chances were remote, in the post-vaccination pandemic, that any of us had gotten it, I still felt like I had to let them know. I called my doctor’s office, and the receptionist told me that because I’m vaccinated, because it had been seven days since I had seen Q, and since I had no symptoms, she felt I didn’t have to get tested. But since I wanted to be absolutely sure, she found me a slot for that afternoon.

When I got to the ARC, the Rockport testing site “across from the bowling lanes” that serves as the main location for COVID tests around here, the line was so backed up that for about five minutes I couldn’t even turn off of Route 1 into the driveway. The ARC was set up quickly, on-the-fly, at the start of the pandemic. It still has a potent ramshackle quality with its unassuming temporary sign held to the ground with sand bags and concrete blocks. A tiny shack with an interior painted medicinal pink is where the day’s tests are stored and the people work.
The person who took my test there a few days ago on a raw, rainy day was cheery, kind and friendly, especially to the many children who were being
tested. I told her that the last time I had been tested there, the person, very kind as well, but perhaps in training, had made my nose bleed, so she said she would be as gentle as possible.

When I asked how many tests they’re doing per day, she told me she recently did 80 tests in one afternoon, and that lately they have been testing about 130 to 150 people daily. This time, no blood was drawn. I thanked her for everything she is doing for the community, and she said, “Awww, it makes days like these a little bit easier when somebody says something like that.” I left teary-eyed, again, not just because having a swab stuck up your nostrils and firmly twisted five times around kind of does that to you, but also for my immense gratitude to everyone who has been working so hard to help us all get through this pandemic with as little damage as possible.

Q’s PCR test came back positive for COVID. Luckily, it hasn’t made her too sick. And in this case, the vaccines worked — her vaccinated mom tested negative, and my PCR test was negative, too. I didn’t get COVID and spread it to my loved ones in New York, who then might have spread it to others. In some instances, vaccinated people are getting breakthrough cases of COVID, but, by and large, it’s still rare, and even rarer for a vaccinated person to be hospitalized.

When will this end? I don’t know. But the more people get vaccinated, the less chance the virus has to mutate, keep spreading and keep the whole cycle going.
On the day I wrote this, PenBay Medical Center had four COVID patients, and its ICU beds were 96% full. It’s a post-vaccine world, but with so many people afraid, nervous, angry, defiant, principled, misled, misinformed, overworked, too busy, etc., to take it, and with billions more around the world who live in countries who have been vaccine-deprioritized, it’s not over yet. My brush with COVID scared me and I’m still working out, as we all are, moment to moment, what risks to take, and how to go on.