December 2020
December 2, 2020, the U.S. reported 2,760 COVID-19 deaths.
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist and a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC tweeted this image:
An associate pastor from the Nawa megachurch in Fontana, CA contracted COVID-19 and eventually died from medical complications stemming from it.
In the late hours of December 8, 2020, the State of California changed its COVID-19 guidance to allow outdoor playgrounds to open amidst stay-home orders.
Because I’m a sick person (and a masochist), I had thought about rewatching Contagion since the beginning of the pandemic. Well, I finally rented it from Amazon Prime, and what a terrible decision it was.
The first twenty minutes of the film was horrific. A mere nine months of COVID-19 life had already traumatized me.
During the early part of the film, I repeatedly turned to my wife and shook my head and whispered, “Why am I doing this?”
The worst part was when a sick man boarded a crowded bus and coughed up a storm before staggering off of it. Each cough made me squirm and grimace as I watched from our couch with wireless headphones.
By early December, the B.1.1.7 variant was causing a surge of cases in southeastern England. Nowadays known as the “Alpha” variant, it is significantly more infectious than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2.
In mid-December, South Africa’s health department reported that it had identified a new COVID-19 variant known as B.1.351. Like B.1.1.7, the variant was believed to be more transmissible than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2.
Meanwhile, my younger sister, her baby daddy, and their son were driving down to southern California to spend Christmas and New Year’s with his family, as they did every year.
For our nephew’s sake, my older sister implored our sister not to go, but I knew it was futile to try to convince them to cancel their plans. My younger sister told us that they were all getting COVID-19 tests before convening, but I knew that didn’t guarantee that it would be safe for that many people to gather.
Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, was undergoing an ungodly surge of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. On December 29th, 2020, the Los Angeles Times reported that L.A. County hospitals were turning away ambulances and were forced to put patients in their gift shop. Hospitals in surrounding counties were either at or above intensive care unit (ICU) capacity.
In late December, I listened to a Longform podcast episode with science writer, Ed Yong. One snippet from podcast host, Max Linsky, rang with great clarity: “One of the things for me that has been so striking about this year, and what this virus has done…if there was shit, it’s exposed it. Family life, friends, work, and then much larger societal things.”
My wife and I had a video call with my younger sister while they were in southern California so that our sons could see one another. My sister walked around my future in-laws’ house during the call. As expected, no one wore a mask.
On December 30, 2020, the COVID-19 Tracking Project reported 1.6 million tests, 226,000 cases, a record 125,220 hospitalizations, and a record 3,903 COVID-19 deaths in the United States.
A survey of the American Nurses Association, the largest such association in the United States, reported some startling and demoralizing results in regards to their “nurses’ knowledge of and attitude toward COVID-19 vaccine development.” This particular question and its results just absolutely fucking depressed me:
On New Year’s Eve, I rode BART for the first time since March 2020. It was just a twelve-minute midday ride from Hayward to Fremont to meet up with my in-laws for dinner. My wife and I felt it was relatively safe as long as I wore a KN95 mask.
I will always remember that the only other two people riding in the train car were sitting at the polar ends. In that train car, they could not have possibly sat any further away from one another.
On Twitter and Instagram, I saw a number of friends and family cheer about how we had survived 2020 and how much they looked forward to 2021. But with the troubling virus mutations and underwhelming polling numbers of health care professionals willing to get vaccinated against COVID-19, I didn’t see a goddamn thing to be hopeful about in the coming year.
Up until that point (I know that sounds so lawyerly), the end of 2020 was my pandemic nadir.
January 2021
On January 4, 2021, it was reported that a Kaiser Permanente San Jose staff member “wearing an air-powered costume with a fan” briefly appeared in their emergency department on Christmas Day and subsequently infected forty-four colleagues. The staff member was unknowingly infected with COVID-19. One staff member subsequently died.
When I first read about this story, I was so bemused by the description of the “air-powered costume with a fan.” Just what the hell did that mean?
This is the picture of the staff member’s costume:
If anyone had any doubt that this coronavirus was airborne, I think that unbelievably sad story should squelch any uncertainty.
In early January 2021, the P.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2, with three mutations to its spike protein, was first detected in Japan among people who had travelled from Manaus, Brazil.
January 6, 2021, outgoing President Trump held a rally at a park in front of the White House just before the House of Representatives and Senate convened to certify the 2020 presidential election. It sparked an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that would leave more than 150 U.S. Capitol police officers injured, 1 fatally wounded, and 4 others dead.
Hours after the attempted insurrection, the first time the U.S. Capitol had been breached since 1814, Congress certified the election.
Of course, Senior Trump aides knew that their actions to contest the election result could fuel chaos.
On that first full week in January 2021, my department received some surprising news: administrative staff members like us—even though we did not interact with patients or the general public—would soon be eligible to receive the Moderna vaccine.
In a one-sentence e-mail, the director of our Development department asked a medical assistant at our Irvington Clinic to schedule us for our first vaccine appointment. Only then did I realize I was 99% sure I wanted to receive an mRNA vaccine.
In classic wasteful American fashion, various media outlets were reporting that unused COVID-19 vaccine doses were being thrown away at hospitals and health care facilities at the end of the day. Per federal and state guidelines on vaccine distribution, these leftover, thawed-out doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could not be administered to members of the general public.
I did a deep dive on mRNA vaccines. I read articles and lengthy Twitter threads about how they work; how the technology was developed; and watched a couple of explanatory and educational YouTube videos about them.
After reading multiple articles and tweets about unused COVID-19 vaccines being thrown out at health care facilities at the end of an inoculation day, even though I didn’t feel it was fair whatsoever that I was getting a shot at the vaccine before many, many, many others who more urgently needed it, I wasn’t about to let my vaccine dose potentially go to waste. That seemed like a greater sin. And so, I subsequently scheduled my first vaccination for January 14.
This is what I tweeted that morning:
“I got my 1st dose of the Moderna vaccine 45 minutes ago! So far, I'm feeling some unusual tingly sensations on my left arm, where I got the shot. It's subtle, fleeting. No pain. I've heard arm soreness is common. I feel a little light-headed, but my morning coffee is kicking in.”
On January 16, 2020, then-Los Angeles Times health reporter Soumya Karlamangla tweeted this chart of COVID-19 deaths in California:
Throughout January, my wife and I kept our distance from my immediate family after their holiday trip to southern California. And things were quiet on their end as well.
A few days later, my son was scratching my beard, which he called “itchies.” “I want to grow itchies someday when I bigger,” he said. “I want to match…with Daddy.” I chuckled and kissed the top of his head. But as I did, I couldn’t help but think: well, I hope we get there someday, mijo.
Shortly after January 18—MLK Jr. Day—my wife and I found out that our sister-in-law’s parents had tested positive for COVID-19. They took care of my sister-in-law’s daughter on Mondays and Fridays every week, then their baby was dropped off at my in-laws’ house Tuesday through Thursday. Because of the national holiday, my sister-in-law and her husband didn’t work so they took care of my infant niece instead of having her parents come over to take care of her.
By sheer luck of the calendar, the MLK Jr. holiday spared our entire COVID bubble from potentially getting infected because my sister-in-law’s parents were infectious but not symptomatic on that holiday Monday when they normally took care of my niece.
All along, I thought my infant niece coming to my in-laws’ house three times a week was the biggest vulnerability to our COVID bubble, and it nearly proved true. When I found out just how close we all came to getting infected, I had to clear my head and take a walk around the block.
In mid-January, the Amazonian city of Manaus—which had suffered a surge of COVID-19 cases in May 2020—underwent an even larger wave of infections and death attributed to the P.1 variant. The surge in cases and deaths suggested the variant was readily capable of reinfection and seemed to push the herd immunity threshold even higher than before.
In late December 2020 and January 2021, I read Frank M. Snowden’s historical textbook, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. In the book’s preface, which he wrote in early 2020 when the pandemic was ramping up, Snowden wrote something that has never strayed far from my mind when I think about the pandemic: “Microbes that ignite pandemics are those who evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses."
On January 21st, the New York Times recommended upgrading from a standard cloth mask to a high-grade mask when going into public spaces in light of the new coronavirus variants.
In late January, a long-term care home in Ontario experienced an outbreak attributed to the B.1.1.7 variant. A total of 235 nursing home residents and staff members were infected. 71 ultimately died from the outbreak.
On Saturday morning, January 30th, less than an hour before we were supposed to meet up at a park for a playdate we had planned for a number of days, my younger sister—out of guilt—confessed that she and her baby daddy got COVID-19 from their Christmas trip and subsequently infected my mom. Somehow or another, probably because he keeps to himself, my father was spared. My nephew must have gotten infected but was never symptomatic. They had all recovered from their mild infections. (My sister, did, however, lose her sense of smell, which is a neurological impairment.)
My sister and mother told me they didn’t want to tell us they got infected because they didn’t want me to worry about them. But, since my sister literally waited until the last minute to tell me, I deduced that they were prepared to not ever tell me that they had gotten sick.
My sister swears that she must have gotten infected from a public restroom on the long drive back to the Bay Area after attending to a female emergency, but that can never be proven. And it’s inconsequential. They brought the virus into my parents’ home.
It didn’t feel right to meet up for our playdate and just pretend everything’s all hunky-dory (which is, historically speaking, my family’s M.O. for dealing with just about any negativity). Initially, I was infuriated at my supposedly future brother-in-law because I know he’s the one who pushed my sister to visit his family for the holidays as though a motherfucking historic pandemic wasn’t happening. If I saw him that day, I would’ve wanted to wring his neck.
After this incident, I lost a lot of trust in my sister. I think much less of her, and our relationship just isn’t the same. (It had already been deteriorating for many, many years, but this furthered it and unearthed all that decay we had ignored.)
February 2021
One Friday in early February, on my day off, Vicente Fernández’s “Para Siempre” looped in my head. At lunchtime, I looked the song up on YouTube and watched an astounding live version. To my surprise, I got a little worked up listening to it. Then, I listened to a Spanish pop song my maternal grandmother once recorded on a mix tape for my mom. Growing up, my mom played the tape a lot in our kitchen while she cooked or cleaned. As I listened to the song in my kitchen, I remembered my family in Perú—my beloved cousins, aunts and uncles, and my godmother who is in her eighties now. I had not visited them in nine years. During the entire pandemic I never once cried but I choked up and began to sob as I listened to the song and thought of them. I ache to see them and breathe my homeland. In that moment, I was scared that I might never see them again, or that some of them will be dead by the time it’s as safe as it will ever be to visit them.
Journalist David Wallace-Wells, primarily known for his writings on climate change, wrote an article published on February 5th titled “What If Herd Immunity Is Out of Reach?” I had already been thinking about that a lot in the prior few weeks. With the B.1.1.7 and P.1 variants, I began to feel like the virus was inevitably a step or two ahead of us, and with its high airborne transmissibility, it’s perfectly adapted to exploit the vulnerabilities of the modern societies we've constructed.
By this early juncture in America’s vaccine rollout, a number of stories were being reported of people cheating to cut in line for the vaccine. For example, wealthy individuals eligible for a vaccine would travel to poorer neighborhoods where they knew vaccine skepticism would be higher and more appointment slots would be available. In certain states and municipalities where documentation to prove vaccine eligibility was not stringent, people would simply lie about their profession (I’m an essential worker!) or about health comorbidities they didn’t have (I have asthma!) in order to get a poke.
On February 23rd, my father and mother got their second dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Around that time, my beloved in-laws—our angels throughout this pandemic—received their first vaccine doses. Once they got their first shots, I could feel a visceral sensation of relief between my shoulders, a tension I had not known I’d been carrying.
In late February, I took mijo on a father-son grocery shopping trip for the first time since March 2020. It was a fruit stand near our home that's partially open air. Even though it’s a place I felt safe taking him, I felt really anxious looking after him that first time back at a store. Even though there were only a few people around us, my natural instinct is to quickly get in and get out of a store. I snapped at him when he dropped a carrot I was asking him to put into a plastic bag. I felt horrible about it immediately afterwards. My poor son. After all this time shopping solo, I also wasn’t used to our old tandem shopping.
March 2021
In early March, I went to my parents’ house to visit them and my sister and my nephew. In the kitchen, before I left, I held my nephew in my arms. Since we were indoors, because I wasn’t fully vaccinated, I wore a KN95 mask. “Hopefully someday soon I won’t have to wear this when I see you,” I told him, and I would never share such a fragile sentiment unless I believed it was possible.
One of the COVID-19-themed podcasts I listened to passed on this incisive quote from Roderick E. McGrew, who wrote a 1965 book titled Russia and the Cholera, 1823-1832: "Epidemics do not create abnormal situations, but rather sharpen existing behavior patterns which betray deeply rooted and continuing social imbalances."
A CDC study released on March 8th found that 78% of Americans who have been hospitalized from Covid-19 were overweight or obese. The study drew upon 148,494 adults who had received a Covid-19 diagnosis during an emergency department or inpatient visit at 238 U.S. hospitals from March to December 2020. 71,491 of those adults were hospitalized. Of those who were admitted, 27.8% were overweight and 50.2% were obese.
My sister, who has lived at our parents’ house for over three years, lied and said she lived at an assisted care facility in order to qualify for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that was being offered in our community.
This vaccine cheating was so prevalent that my good friend began to question if he was a chump for patiently waiting his turn for the vaccine.
Talk about first-world problems: online vaccine appointments across the country were incredibly hard to schedule. Available slots would get taken up right as you were trying to book them. It was like trying to get tickets for a sold-out show via Ticketmaster.
In short time, volunteers known as “vaccine hunters” sprouted to help people—particularly elderly folks who were not computer savvy—to help them find and schedule a vaccine appointment.
My wife spent weeks trying to book a vaccine appointment. Despite her periodic asthma problems, our healthcare provider told her she was ineligible for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Around this time, my sister-in-law took her son to the hospital for his adolescent booster shots. The nurse asked her if she had received a COVID-19 vaccine. When my sister-in-law told her she didn’t think she qualified, the nurse advised her to complete the vaccine eligibility quiz and say she took care of kids in order to qualify. She subsequently booked an appointment and advised my wife to follow the same steps.
On March 31st, my wife was scheduled to receive her first dose of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine. We started the morning with a joyous hopping-hug dance.
April 2021
On his weekly podcast and during interviews with the press, Dr. Michael Osterholm repeatedly called the SARS-CoV-2 variants “game changers.”
Justin Feldman, a Research Associate at the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University and a social epidemiologist who researches racism and health perfectly summed up the U.S. pandemic strategy in a single tweet:
In early April, my colleague who works at a different clinic site, told me a vendor stepped into their office peddling 3D posters and other kitsch. Man, is there any surer sign that 'Murica is back!? Pandemic? What pandemic! We slayed it!
On April 7th, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky remarked that the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant of COVID-19 had become the dominant strain in the United States.
The next day, I tuned into a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) webinar discussing the American Rescue Plan Act that would provide $6 billion in one-time funding to our nation's health centers to “support and expand COVID-19 vaccination, testing, and treatment for vulnerable populations.” The moderator—a government employee, mind you—mentioned a "post-COVID" world in his opening comments and I was like, what the goddamn fuck are you talking about a post-COVID world?
On April 14th, American political scientist Ian Bremmer tweeted:
While vaccine hesitancy was slowly declining, multiple polls showed that it was still prevalent. A March 2021 survey of 732,308 Americans, the Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University found that “More than one-third didn't think they needed the shot, didn't trust the government, were waiting to see if the vaccine was safe or didn't trust COVID-19 vaccines specifically. And 14.5% said they didn't like vaccines in general.”
On April 15th, The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world, published “Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” which was co-authored by a number of heavy hitters in the world of science including Jose-Luis Jimenez, Zeynep Tufekci, and Kimberly Prather. I figured it would be worthwhile to note this in the recap because scientific experts of their caliber had to write what was so plainly obvious over a year into this global pandemic.
Renowned epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch shared a Slate article titled “It’s About Time for Us to Stop Wearing Masks Outside” on Twitter and said, “I must agree. I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit. Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits.”
On April 20th, eleven months after he murdered George Floyd, Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter
According to my own calculations—which I did for work purposes—as of April 25, 2021, 47% of Whites residing in Alameda County who do not identify as Latines have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Asians were 44.3%, Blacks 28%, and Latines 25.6%. Vaccine inequities among racial/ethnic groups was real.
May 2021
On May 2, 2021, CNN producer and math junkie, Ryan Struyk (just check out his Twitter timeline) tweeted, “The total number of US coronavirus deaths (576,866) just surpassed the population of the state of Wyoming (576,851).
On May 9th, India recorded over 400,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day.
Meanwhile, on Mother’s Day, with the adults in my immediate family fully vaccinated, I casually walked into my parents' house from the backyard without donning a mask. My father was lounging on the couch, without a mask, watching TV. I greeted him in passing and he nonchalantly said hi back, seemingly unaware of just how enormous this moment was for me since I had not walked into their house without a mask in over a year. (In fact, I had only walked into their house a handful of times up until that point in the pandemic.) I almost teared up on my way to the kitchen.
On May 10, 2021, the WHO classified the B.1.617 variant first identified in India in late 2020 as a variant of global concern.
May 14, 2021, in a decision it would rue in the coming months, the CDC said fully-vaccinated people would no longer need to wear a face mask or stay six feet away from others in most settings, whether indoors or outdoors.
June 2021
On June 15th, the CDC declared the B.1.617 variant, now commonly known as the “Delta variant,” a variant of concern after it torched India in April and May 2021.
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