Saturday, December 19, 2020

Pandemic Holidays

The lights of Ferndale
With the holiday shopping season beginning in December, store hours have been extended and I have some 8am start times, meaning I am back to winter bicycle commuting two or three days a week. Last week I rode in a couple of big wind and rain storms, but the weather is looking a bit milder for the next couple of weeks. I hope, because even though it has felt good to be more active, leaving home in the dark at 7am is already wearing me down.

Sometimes I think retail workers aren't really essential. It's more that we are expendable.

Tightened COVID restrictions this month are showing how car-centered and car-dependent many communities are. Sunday mornings when I go out for my morning walk, I skip stopping for coffee and pastry afterwards because customers are no longer allowed to sit inside, even socially-distanced. The Ferndale Starbuck's usually has a line of cars at the drive-through window that goes all the way around the building, through the parking lot, even backing up around the corner on Main Street. Standing outside on the sidewalk to eat and drink just isn't appealing, I'd rather go home for homemade coffee and a snack.

Less trivially, free public COVID testing sites at first required people to line up in cars and submit to testing through their rolled-down windows. The sites had to improvise walk-up testing for carless people. 

Back in October, I was ill for a few days with (probably) a combination of seasonal allergies stirred up when the heat started coming on in my apartment, plus a sudden, violent stomach bug. At my job employees are required to complete an on-line health questionnaire every day before coming in, and have our temperature taken at the entrance to the store. When I reported nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, chills, headache, sore throat, runny nose, fatigue, muscle and body aches, I was barred from returning to work until after either a negative COVID test or a 14-day quarantine.

I called around to some Urgent Care clinics for information about testing and learned that the offices in Bellingham allowed people to walk in to the front desk to check in, then go back outside and wait in their cars for a lab technician to come out to collect a sample.

My regular doctor's office is about a mile from where I live in Ferndale, but they usually can't take unscheduled walk-in emergencies. First I had a phone consultation, then they scheduled me for a video chat the next morning, before agreeing to let me come in for testing. I had been very ill the night before and didn't want to take the bus in to Bellingham. (I also wasn't really up to managing the technology required to set up a video consultation.) I wasn't allowed to enter the clinic building, instead a lab tech and physician's assistant met me outside with a sample kit so I could stick a swab up my own nose myself.

Luckily, my test was negative, and I was cleared to work after two sick days. And now I'm back to riding the storms in December.