Pandemic Journal Entry for 11/7/21

This week I decided to participate in UCONN’s ongoing Pandemic Journal project.  First time in a while for that.  

After submitting my entries in response to their questions, I decided to repost them on my blog.  First time in a while for that as well.

Q: How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your life in the past week?  Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.  

A: The new normal continues.  This week we cleaned out the office.  With most of our employees working remotely, who will continue to work that way going forward, a decision made over time during the pandemic, we rented a dumpster to throw away stuff no longer needed.  The employees had been given until last Monday to return to the office and collect anything personal they had left at their desks.  After that, it was going to be thrown away.  

I worked on one section of the office that hadn’t been used for some time.  The work done by the employees that use to work there had been transferred to another office in another state where lock-downs as severe as ours had not been imposed.  It was something like going on an archaeological dig as I pulled open drawers and pulled things out.  Packets of crackers and sweets kept as snacks.  Tea bags.  Menus to local restaurants that had shut down due to the virus.  A little hand-spinner thing that had become a fad at one point.  Empty plastic containers from a lunch brought one day.  A photo of a child, his name and date of the photo on the back.  He had been 4 months old when the photo was taken.  He should be about 9 years old now.  Into the trash it went.  Along with staplers that no longer work, manuals for printers that had been disposed of and replaced, paper work that for jobs long completed and delivered.  

The longing for “returning to normal” no longer comes to me.  What I do now has become normal.  But with the political situation that the pandemic has exacerbated, even this doesn’t feel like the final state of what “normal” will be. 

Q: Are you in touch with people in other parts of the country, or the world?  If so, how has the pandemic affect them.

A: I call my parents and speak to them weekly.  We have had numerous conversations about the pandemic and the response.  Both of my parents are vaccinated, getting their shots as soon as they could after they were approved and able to do so.  They live in an area of the country where there is a high degree of skepticism about the vaccine and resistance to wearing masks or being socially distant.  Over the months, they have relayed on several occasions arguments with neighbors, friends, and acquaintances about the situation, its cause, and the right thing to do about it.  They tended to stay at home all the time in the beginning, avoiding people as much as possible.  As things opened up, some of the normal routine returned, such as returning to their bowling league, where they would have every other lane closed to keep people apart.  Right now, being fully vaccinated and wearing their masks, they feel more comfortable about going the things they were doing before, although still altered by the few constrains being applied.  

Every week, I also participate in a Japanese-English language exchange.  A Zoom meeting that replaced a face to face meeting we used to have before the pandemic in my hometown.  When the meeting went online, people from Japan found out about it and started to join.  

Their experience has been much harsher than what I was going through in California.  The vaccines were much slower to roll out than here.  Some of them were only able to get their first shots within the last few weeks.  And in Tokyo, after the Olympics was over, they went through another huge surge of cases.  One participant that lives in the city reported one week that it was announced there were no more hospital beds available in the city, and that people were told to stay and home and take care of themselves as best they could while doing so, to only go to the hospital if it was an absolute emergency.  The next week he reported that it had been announced that there were no longer any spare ambulances to transport people to the hospital for emergencies, and that several people had died as a result of not being able to reach the treatment they needed.  I was also surprised to hear from several participants in Japan a lot of skepticism about the vaccine.  They asked me a lot of questions about side effects when I told them I had received my shots.  Several of them had told me they were not planning to get the vaccine when it was available, including one woman who worked at health resort.  Since then, I’m relieved to hear some of them tell me that they have recently received their first short and have their second one scheduled.  

Q: Do you wish to add anything to this week’s entry? 

A: I mentioned in a previous entry that the “new normal” continues.  But I’m still not sure that we’ve reached that point.  

What I’m feeling most right now is that the pandemic has exacerbated the divisions in this country that were boiling just under the surface.  It was another thing to divide us.  And it did so it ways I find illogical and unnecessary.  

I am trying to figure out what is going to happen to us next.  And how I should prepare for it. Something in my gut tells me it will need more than just a disaster kit tucked away in my closet.