Day 432…
There is nothing quite like the sound of total silence when you get off the elevator in the basement with a full bag of laundry. It’s like when you walk down the steps into the subway just as the train pulls into the station. It means no waiting. Some days everything just lines up. Somebody I knew referred to that feeling of kismet when it happens as an “I love NY day”.
This past Thursday, the Center for Disease Control announced that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks or social distance. Curfews on restaurants are being lifted. Over the next couple of weeks more and more guidelines will be lifted. By July, New York will be fully reopened with no restrictions. Life can go back to normal.
I can’t take my mask off.
Michael and I also had COVID a year ago so that combined with the Pfizer and Moderna shots we got should make us ten times more resistant to the virus than somebody who never became infected.
I still can’t take my mask off, nor do I want to be near people that I don’t know who are not wearing masks. I’m comfortable going to a restaurant with friends and sitting at the table with them without our masks on, but up until now, we have always discussed it first. To hug or not to hug? Does this table seem OK in terms of airflow? Is it too crowded?
I don’t know that it makes a lot of sense for me to keep wearing a mask. Our cloth face coverings were never designed to keep us from getting infected ourselves, they were supposed to keep us from spreading it to others. The official mandate was never that we had to wear a mask all the time outside, only when it was impossible for us to observe social distancing. It became much easier to just wear a mask all the time than it was to keep thinking about it. Over time we all forgot what the real mandates were.
I’ve been out and about throughout this entire year. That is not true of a lot of people I know who truly isolated. I don’t think that I was reckless, I kept away from other people and I didn’t go into crowded trains or cramped stores. Knowing that I survived the virus once probably gave me more confidence than I should have had, but nonetheless, I’ve never felt terrified of getting it. Concerned, certainly, but never terrified. Many others in our social orbit were and maybe still are very anxious around it.
After 14 months of making my own schedule, I am working again. We are still in pre-production, so my salary hasn’t kicked in yet, but it looks like before the end of the month that I’ll be getting on a plane.
Nobody is sure what protocols will be in place and which of them can now be set aside.
A groundswell of reaction from health experts around the CDC’s lifting of the mask mandate has been concern that the new measures may have come too soon. In their rush to share some positive news, they may have jumped the gun.
The CDC, along with their headline, released some caveats but how many people will really read beyond the headline? This new mandate ONLY applies to people who are two weeks past their final shot. About 47% of the US population has now gotten at least one dose of the vaccine and 37% are now considered fully vaccinated. That number needs to rise to at least 70-80% before there is an effective firewall in place against the virus’s transmission. Different areas of the country have had different levels of success in rolling out the vaccine. Low-income communities that tend to have a greater percentage of people of color have had more difficulty getting the vaccine than wealthier, whiter communities.
They are saying that schools should keep masking for at least the rest of this school year. Pfizer is now authorized for kids 12-15 years old, but nobody younger than that is eligible yet. Businesses, they say, should keep the mask mandates in effect at least until all their employees have been fully vaccinated.
The Director of the CDC went on to say that Americans are going to need to take responsibility for themselves when it comes to getting vaccinated and following precautions. Not to be a naysayer, but we don’t have a great history of following the honor system about anything. And that’s just here. The CEO of the airport in Dubai, which is the busiest international hub on the planet said that he does not think that anything other than a vaccine passport is going to work for us to be able to resume any sort of regular travel.
The European Union is planning on letting vaccinated people from outside their borders in this summer if they can prove that they have been fully vaccinated. The Equality and Human Rights Commission warns that while vaccine passports work in principle, they are also going to create a two-tiered society where some have the right to go and do what they want, and some don’t. It would be easy to say that that is fine and the people who are refusing to get vaccinated need to accept the consequences of that choice, but some people are medically unable to be vaccinated. What about them? Does that mean that somebody who’s had an organ transplant can’t fly anywhere?
There are many places around the globe that are still drowning in COVID cases. India is in the middle of an unimaginable crisis. People are dying because they can’t find oxygen. Japan did not pre-order enough vaccines. Poorer undeveloped countries are going to need us to step in and help them achieve some sort of immunity wall themselves. Having one here won’t do us any good if nobody else has one. Even Canada which led us for so long in their response has fallen behind in the vaccination process.
I can see past all of this. I know we will all be trudging through airports, maybe even the one in Dubai, that are crowded with people in the not-too-distant future. We will line up to get into clubs and theatres and restaurants that are packed to the brim with maskless people. We will walk into stores without giving their architecture a second thought. All of that will happen. I can see all that. It’s the next couple of months that I cannot really figure out.
I’ve gotten used to wearing a mask. In places like Japan where people have been wearing masks for years, they only wear them when they, themselves, are sick. I hope that we, here in the United States, can keep that going. How many cases of the regular flu and other colds would we avoid getting if people did that for each other? I know that there is no reason for me to wear a mask now. Intellectually, I am all over it. Whatever it is that I could possibly transmit to someone, it is almost surely not going to be COVID. I’m about as unlikely a vector for that as anyone is.
I’m just not ready yet. It doesn’t make any rational sense, but there you are. I’ll get there, but I’m going to do it in my own time. I would rather be too safe than too reckless. I’m not looking forward to being locked down when I start work again or having to keep a mask on in whatever bubble we create, but if that’s what it is, then I’m not going to be the one to put my foot down against it. I’ll roll my eyes a little, but I’ll do it until we all really don’t have to.
Going down to the laundry room in a mask is one of the few times that I am bothered by having my face covered. The room is small, and the dryers make it feel hot and close. It’s hard to get a satisfying deep breath of air. Maybe by July, if all goes well, we won’t need to do that anymore.
My mask is hanging on the window latch, dry from having washed it out last night. Either hanging there or on my face, I can still see past it into this beautiful summer-like day. I had luck in the laundry room this morning, let’s see if that luck continues.
💕Here’s to more Kismet days....me too, vaccinated and mask on. Trusting my instincts not internet...and W❤️RK!! Lucky you....even luckier “them” ❤️🎈🌟🎭