It’s April. Where does the time go?

Our personal pandemic is looking like it will have an end date of mid-May, as we get our second dose shortly, and many friends follow suit. I’m looking forward to small gatherings again (maybe a couple vaccinated people over for board games or Rock Band).

What I’m really looking forward to is an outing to Fogo de Chao, which would be my first meal in a restaurant since last March. But such a meal is probably much further out (probably August or September?), since we not only have to all be vaccinated, and the waitstaff have to be vaccinated, but we also have to have gotten local cases down enough where I’d feel comfortable not taking the usual precautions in public.

But we’re so close to the end… and I hate how so many people are prematurely letting their guard down. Vaccination is not a 100% thing… by the latest numbers, it’s approximately 90% effective, which means you still have a 10% chance (multiplied by your regular risk percentage) of getting COVID. Why can’t everyone just hang on that little while longer and bring community numbers down?

We’re continuing to do our part. The riskiest thing we did during the past 13 months was probably getting the first vaccine dose. We walked about 9 miles round trip to the south side vaccination clinic (we don’t allow ourselves public transit), which just seems to be most of the first floor of UPMC Mercy, where we entered a building for longer than a minute for the first time in five months, and remained there for a bit over 30 minutes between waiting for the shot and completing the required 15 minute wait period.

Other than that, the riskiest things I’ve done have been to go to the dentist for a toothache, and go to the doctor earlier this week for some persistent pain, both of which were extremely nerve-wracking at the time, but arguably falling under the bucket of “essential”.

So overall, we’ve been very careful throughout this pandemic, and especially the past ~5 months as cases have started to spike again. I stopped physically going into stores, instead opting for curbside pickup for groceries. And other than the aforementioned doctor trips and quick stops in restaurants to pick up (preordered) food, we’ve been avoiding going inside buildings. I think we’ve been extremely fortunate in that our jobs and lives allow us to have isolated so effectively.

In any case, life goes.