"COVID-Cautious Americans Feel Abandoned"

[deurbano]

81. Since my daughter's disability is the result of a brain injury (cerebral palsy), we are still doing

all we can to avoid COVID, too. She doesn't need any additional negative impact on brain functioning, and she also had lymphoma (with a tumor on her esophagus) in 2013, which resulted in 5 months in the hospital (and more recovery at home after that), so avoiding any more impact on her lungs has been another consideration. She (now 50) and I (69) finished our undergraduate degrees at Berkeley during COVID (I had to go in person, wearing a highly ranked mask at all times, while she was able to do it remotely from our home in San Francisco)... but otherwise, our lives have been much more constrained than before. We only go to restaurants with outdoor seating and wear masks inside places not out home. If anyone comes inside our house, they wear a mask or test beforehand. Mainly it's just our younger children (25-yr-old son/wife and 21-yr-old daughter) who come inside, but we've also had several backyard parties. My husband got COVID on a business trip, and my younger daughter (in grad school in LA) has had it twice, but my son has never tested positive. (I find it hard to believe he hasn't gotten it without knowing it, though, since he's much less careful than his younger sister.) He got married during this time, too, and we timed our vaccinations to be about two and a half weeks before the event, so we could go mask free without too much worry. (And it was a time of lower prevalence.) We've used that strategy for trips to the East Coast, too, since my older daughter has had as couple of in-person meetings for the National Council on Disability, and those involved trips to Washington and Rhode Island (and we also went to Manhattan). But we still wore masks most of the time indoors, and found outside dining. I'm getting sick of it, though, and wish they'd come up with a daily nasal spray or some other preventative measure. My older daughter does a lot of Zoom call meetings, pretty much every day, but she used to be out all day everyday, using public transportation, and that's so hard to imagine now.

This is my son interpreting for my daughter at a Speaker Emerita Pelosi event in January. She and I always wear masks for these types of events: https://imgur.com/a/TsChqQl