Saturday, September 19, 2020

Chronicle of plague time's new normal

Getting our flu shots is even more vital than usual this year. Think how awful it would be, for the individual and for the medical system, if we were to catch both COVID and the flu. Yesterday I joined that ubiquitous feature of pandemic times, the socially distanced line. My health care provider, Kaiser Permanente, is good at herding us all through our annual pinprick. We were sorted into separate lines outside the door -- flu shots, coronavirus testing, and regular medical appointments.

It was only a 10 minute wait to get to the women giving the shots. I suggested I should receive the geezer doze -- the enhanced shot for elders. "Sorry," she said. People were so eager to get their shots this year that Kaiser ran out of the elder doses the first day they opened, last Monday. That's good I guess. Let's hope this particular iteration of the flu shot is a potent defense.

Then I charged off to one of the handful of library branches finally partially reopened. Since mid-March, I'd been unable to return the stack of books I had checked out when we shut down -- or pick up new volumes on which I'd asked online for holds. Then the fires made the air so awful that librarians couldn't be asked to stand in it, so branches didn't open for even take out. (That's a lot better than it was for the garbage collectors, postal workers and many delivery people ...) But yesterday they were up and running.

Sidewalk library service to go, available here. If you can work the system.

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