The Virus

3 days after we moved in to Mirabella, we were told that the restaurants would be closed and meals would be delivered to us each night in our apartment.

We had just spent two weeks in Los Angeles instead of our usual six weeks in Santa Monica because of the pending move from our old apartment at Park Avenue West. We had to downsize again!

Not long after the restaurants closed, we had to wear masks when inside and there could be a maximum of two people on the elevator. Everything else was also closed: library, pool, exercise room etc.

The result of all of this is that we never really met anyone here and even when we meet them in the elevator, we (I) don’t recognize them later because I can’t see their face. We have not spoken enough to people to be able to recognize their voice.

This was all back in March of 2019 and at that the time, we really did not think about how long this would last because people were talking about going back to normal in a few weeks. In many states and countries, they re-opened too soon and had to go back to lockdown. Some places did this several times.

Mirabella arranged for us to get vaccinated in January 2021. I was surprised because Oregon had done a poor job of arranging the vaccine supply and scheduling the administration. We had the Pfizer vaccine with the first dose on January 21, 2021 and the second on February 11. Aside from sore arms and fatigue, we had no side effects.

As time goes by, some countries (India) are breaking records for daily new infections and some places (California) are having the lowest infection rates since the pandemic began.  Because there is a sizeable portion of the population that says they will not get the vaccine, we may not reach herd immunity.