Holy night, Covid night...

The Christmas we want...

"All hell dun broke loose," begins an email from a friend tonight, December 23.

Her whole family was gathering from various western US cities to share five days in Palm Springs and then spend Christmas through New Year's Day in Seattle.  

But her son came down with Covid-19 on Monday.  After becoming sick but testing negative, he tested positive today.  That means he will be spending Christmas isolated in Palm Springs while the others fly back to Seattle.

Meanwhile, her granddaughter's partner became sick with a high fever.  He tested negative too but will get a second test tomorrow.  That means her granddaughter is exposed and has to isolate from everyone in the family or at least wear a mask. 

My friend's other granddaughter flew to Seattle from Hawaii to spend Christmas with the family.  Her mother will fly home to Seattle from Palm Springs as scheduled, but her father will stay there until he feels well enough to fly home.

Meanwhile, that granddaughter heard from her roommates at the University of Hawaii that two of them have tested positive.  That means she needs to quarantine from her mother.  

This Omicron variant is spreading like wildfire, everywhere from New York to Hawaii.

How do you do togetherness at Christmas when 2-3 family members are sick and several of the others are on quarantine?

How do you have Christmas dinner together?  And open presents?  Dare we go out to church in person on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?

We too have had a crazy week here in Santa Monica with two family members arriving from New York City and bringing the Omicron variant with them.  They're in a hotel but one of the two (my niece) tested positive on Wednesday.  She was sharing a bed with her mother, so they both have it, no doubt.  So far neither is very sick, but others may get Covid from them and become sicker.

Meanwhile, my daughter who lives 15 minutes away will probably not come here for Christmas because she spent 5-6 hours on Sunday with friends who got sick on Tuesday.  See my blog post on this Wednesday night, Dec. 22.  

This Omicron variant just sneaked up on all of us.  We did not take it seriously and cancel our travel plans.  

I refused to go to dinner last night with my ex-sister-in-law but did spend 2 hours with her and my niece today in their hotel lobby; I stayed masked except for eating a breakfast sandwich from Starbucks and drinking a peppermint mocha.  Six feet distanced.  Was that too close for this new variant?  Will I get Covid again?

It's all about travel.  If we stayed home, this virus wouldn't spread like a wind-driven fire.  We got too confident that the epidemic was waning.  Instead of shutting down like a year ago, some of us made plans to travel, to visit family, to go out to restaurants and shows.

We must do all we can to keep this virus from spreading, to keep ourselves out of the hospital, and to keep others from being exposed.  Otherwise, we become incubators that help it to mutate further and evade our drugs.   

Taking vaccines and wearing masks are acts of kindness to those who are fragile (have auto-immune illness, are taking immuno suppressants, or are cancer survivors, etc.).  

Doing all we can do is a simple courtesy to the doctors, nurses, and aides who are caring for those who are sick and dying.

For many of us, this Christmas will be Silent night, Covid night....

But still, God comes to us in human form to cheer and redeem us.  

Without all the busyness and distractions of merriment, maybe we will have time to reflect on our place in the Cosmos, to feel the presence of a God who wants to connect with us.

Test your guests!

Do you have out-of-town guests arriving?

Or are you planning to have dinner with friends or relatives who have flown in from somewhere?

Buy a couple boxes of BinaxNOW rapid Covid-19 tests now before your guests drive up or arrive at the airport.  Each box costs about $25 and contains two test kits.

Test yourself and ask your guests to do so also.

Finding the BinaxNOW could be easier said than done.  The shelves could be empty.  But keep trying.  Walgreens and CVS are your best bet. 

"All the Walgreens around here are sold out," a clerk told me at the intersection of Lincoln and Pico Blvd. in Santa Monica.

"When will you get a delivery?" I asked.

"Maybe today or tomorrow, I don't know.  Could be anytime," she replied.

I drove 15 minutes to the next closest Walgreens, and voila!  They had many boxes, all behind the photo shop counter, and twenty people were clustered around as a clerk patiently handed out two per person.

We stood in line to buy them and emerged triumphant.  'Tis the season to be jolly!

I called my niece and her mother, who had arrived the night before from New York City, and offered to deliver a box of BinaxNOW to their hotel.  

They didn't mind testing before our big dinner date in the evening with other family members.  It takes just 15 minutes to get a result.

When I drove up to Casa del Mar Hotel on Ocean Way, they were both outside waiting for me so that I could just hand them the box and not need to go inside the hotel or into their room. 

We chatted for a few minutes on the sidewalk, all three of us wearing masks.  I stood about six feet from them as I explained how I had caught Covid on Nov. 4 from an out-of-town visitor (see previous blog post). 

My niece said she came down with Covid last March after a ski trip to Colorado.  She had two vaccines and a recent booster too.

How vaccine effectiveness drops after 5-6 months

"I've had my vaccines and a booster too, but it was last August," said her mother.

"Well, they say that after five months you need another booster," I said.  "I was 7 months after my last vaccine and a day after my booster when I caught Covid.  But the vaccines protected me from having a serious case."

Then we bumped elbows and said, "See you tonight."  They had plans to visit LACMA this afternoon with another family member.

On the way home, I passed that first Walgreens and decided to stop in.  Maybe they'd had a delivery.

There was a FedEx truck parked outside the store as I drove up.  The delivery man was building a stack of 21 boxes on one dolly cart.  As I watched, half of them fell to the ground.

"Probably the rapid tests, special delivery!" I said to myself.

Right.  Inside I found cartons of BinaxNOW stacked all around the UPS counter with several people walking up to get two boxes.

"Wait!  Just give me a chance to open the cartons," said a clerk.  

I bought two more boxes--deck the halls! Fa-la-la-la-la...

When I telegraphed the news--I have 3 boxes!--I immediately got requests for them.  

One was reserved for my husband, who tested negative this afternoon, as I had done the night before with the last test kit in the house.  We had gone to the Pantages Theater the previous weekend to see Hamilton and could have been exposed then.  We wanted to check before going out to dinner with family.

I drove another box to my daughter and took the third to a friend of hers who suspected that she and her husband had come down with Covid-19.  They each had a fever, aching, and tiredness--but so far hadn't lost their sense of taste or smell.  (I didn't experience that loss when I had Covid a month ago.)

As I was driving to Culver City to deliver these rapid tests, I got a call from my niece.  She had tested positive--though she had absolutely no symptoms.  She felt fine, just as she had when making plans to travel and when they had left New York. 

Her mother tested negative, but clearly she had been exposed to the virus by her non-symptomatic daughter. 

They immediately cancelled their plans to spend a week in Palm Springs after visiting Los Angeles.  Next they separated into two hotel rooms and began looking into how soon they could fly home.  Is it better to wait until they both test negative?  Or fly home before either of them might become symptomatic?

My niece planned to stay in her hotel room until flying home. Silent night, Covid night... 

Her mother said dinner plans were cancelled, but negotiations ensued with my husband and his sister, who were still willing to go to the restaurant.  After all, family members had flown across the country for this visit.

I stayed home.  Last Sunday my daughter had visited her friends (now sick and probably with Covid), so she didn't go to the dinner.  People who have been exposed shouldn't go out and endanger others.

My other daughter, who works at Starbucks, didn't go either.  She's scheduled to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas; if she gets exposed, she can't go to work.  It wouldn't be right to ask someone else to do those holiday shifts.

Much drama, and we didn't even get to the subjects of religion or politics.

Anyway, be a good Girl Scout or Boy Scout, and be prepared.

Buy a couple boxes of rapid tests now.  If you test positive, then you get to stand in line 3-4 hours for a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, as my daughter's friend did today.  

After someone in a lab uses a microscope to look at the genetic material in the droplets from her nose, and someone else sends her an email, she will get the results--tomorrow, if the system works well.

If you get a positive result, you get to start work on quarantining, finding a monoclonal antibody that works on the Omicron variant, contacting people you may have exposed, and interviewing with your local health department in their effort to trace contacts and stop the spread. (The GlaxoSmithKline monoclonal infusion is currently the only one that works on Omicron.)

See details of how complicated all that can be--even if you have a mild case--by checking my posts on November 13 and November 15.

If you've had your vaccines and booster, you will probably not have a serious case of Covid-19 because you still have maybe 20-30% of your antibodies, which will help your body to fight the virus.  If you have an auto-immune illness or are a cancer survivor, you could need hospitalization.

The most important thing we can all do in the next two months is keep ourselves out of the hospital and not expose anyone else.  Our health care workers are already exhausted and stressed out.  We owe them a debt of gratitude.

Taking vaccines and wearing masks are acts of kindness to those who are fragile.

Doing all we can do is a simple courtesy to the doctors, nurses, and aides who are caring for those who are sick and dying.

Doing our part also helps the FedEx delivery people, the drug store employees, the nation, and the world.  Just think about this guy trying to load 21 cartons of rapid tests on one little dolly cart so he can rush on to deliver more to the pharmacy across town.  He's making a list, checking it twice...

Santa and his sleigh in Covid times

The Smiley Guy vs. Abortion Rights

Beware of nice guys.

Chief Justice John Roberts bugs me.

Out of all the judges, he's the most smiley.  He wants to be Mr. Nice Guy.

But really, he's taking away our right to end a pregnancy, to determine how many of us will live the next 8 months of our lives, how we will define ourselves for sixty years.  

What's between us and God, he thinks should be up to him.  

Justice Roberts, can't you be just plain mean like Samuel Alito?  Or Clarence Thomas? 

Or just a raving hypocrite like Brett Kavanaugh?    

That way the country could see through you more easily.

It was astounding to hear you question the lawyers.  Listen to it on YouTube.

"Why is 15 weeks not enough time?" you asked. 

The sheer masculine innocence of that question!

As if hesitating to end a pregnancy were like vaccine hesitancy.  Just get over it, my dears.  Make up your minds. You've got 15 weeks.

13 weeks, actually, since the day you had sex.  

11 weeks from the day your bleeding should have happened.  

7 weeks from the time your period was a month late but you didn't feel pregnant.  

3 weeks from the day your period was two months late and you realized that ohmygod you might really be preggers!  But it couldn't be true.  

Justice Roberts, bless his heart, now gives you three weeks to go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and come to a screeching halt at acceptance that you are actually pregnant.

No, just two weeks to go through those five stages because you still need a week figure out whether to let the pregnancy continue or to end it.  

If you decide you just can't possibly bring a human being into this world and have the strength and sanity and money to take care of him or her, and you certainly couldn't give a baby away to who-knows-what kind of parents, now you have no weeks left to find a Planned Parenthood Clinic.

You may have no money to drive to a clinic 4-5 hours from your home.  Maybe you have no car.

Maybe you need child care for your kids while you spend a day or two getting the job done.  Or maybe you can't take time off from work.  

But don't worry about this, dear, because you've already used up your 15 weeks.  Your life is now in the hands of that smiley guy Roberts and that liar Kavanaugh.  And Alioto and Thomas and Gorsuch.  And of course Amy Coney Barrett, who thinks that handing a baby over to strangers should be easy as pie.  

The government of Mississippi has decided 15 weeks should be enough for you, and the justices will probably agree with them.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor fights for justice
as Senator Elizabeth Warren looks grimly on.

Of course, the US government gives years to American citizens who have vaccination hesitancy, who just can't quite bring themselves to face that needle.    

For abortion hesitancy, however, there's no tolerance.  15 weeks, sweetie.  Get over it.