I’ve covered COVID-19 for almost a year. Here’s what it was like to get a vaccine
My job revolves around numbers.
COVID-19 deaths. Infections and hospitalizations. Vaccinations.
I’ve written about these figures every day for almost a year at The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.
At least 187 people in Beaufort County dead after contracting the coronavirus. On some days, three fatalities reported at a time. Dozens of residents placed into intensive care units.
It’s all become deadening. And that frightens me.
As I walked up to the Bluffton Recreation Center early Friday, nervous about my first Moderna dose, I thought of a quote from an Atlantic article published in late December.
“We’re trying to get through this with a vaccine without truly exploring our soul,” an epidemiologist, Mike Osterholm, told journalist Ed Yong.
Our soul.
My soul.
Finishing work at night, you still think about the numbers.
So, in the rec center’s gymnasium, watching nurses move from person to person on the rubbery basketball court, quickly injecting us with mRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine, how could I not think of Osterholm’s quote?
I’ve grown scared that our collective memory of the pandemic will soon fade.
We’re bringing this crisis to an end through a miraculous feat of science. Life, we’re told, will return to normal.
Does that mean we’ll forget about COVID-19, social distancing and masks? Will we not remember the scars, two generations from now? Are we doomed to the same mistakes in years to come?
I don’t know.
I think there’s reason for hope, though.
Because on Friday, there were glimpses of our capacity for compassion. Our capacity for warmth.
A nurse told me that vaccinating people was the best job she ever had. A few staffers gathered together to help me after I realized my last name was misspelled on the all-important vaccine card.
(It was “Ogozalek,” I explained, not “Oglzalek” or “Ogolzalek.”)
I saw Jason Rios, 37, playing with three of his children on a tennis court outside. Rios, a database administrator for Lockheed Martin at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, was waiting for his partner to get a dose. Rios had been inoculated in January.
His kids cackled and screeched, racing from one end of the court to the other, as Rios watched them, smiling. They seemed happy, oblivious to the pain of the pandemic, which has killed at least 2.8 million people globally.
A National Guard member, who stood next to a dozen or so cars parked in the rec center’s sandy lot, agreed to take a photo of me and my bright yellow vaccination sticker.
The skies were clear. A light breeze rolled through.
While driving on Bluffton Parkway soon after, though, I realized that I have yet to come to terms with this dark year.
I thought of the COVID-19 patient who suffered from heart failure. The grieving woman in Beaufort who couldn’t say goodbye to her dying grandmother. The 88-year-old Sun City resident who had to drive 1,200 miles round-trip to get vaccinated in North Carolina.
I can’t fully comprehend what I’ve written about day after day.
But I’m going to try.
I pray that others will, too.
