COVID Lately

On the night of November 8th Governor Herbert announced that there is an emergency order in place for the next two weeks, due to the terrible number of COVID cases in Utah - thousands diagnosed every day, hospitals at capacity, schools closing left and right.  The order put in place a statewide mask mandate, cancelled all extracurricular activities except for tournament/championship games, and placed a new emphasis on not gathering indoors with anyone outside of your household.  The main ways this affected us were that we kept Eliza home from gym (even though for some reason the gym stayed open), and all in-person church youth activities were cancelled.  It was nice to have a couple of weeks of no activities again, and we enjoyed the down time.

Eliza's Activity Day group was supposed to be making French bread,
so the leader had a Zoom cooking class instead.  Some of Eliza's
bread mysteriously disappeared almost as soon as it was baked.

The kids and I went out to a playground for a little while on lucky Friday the 13th and even though I've always felt comfortable being outside without a mask on, and even though there were only 2 or 3 other families there, I realized we were the only ones not wearing masks.  Oops.

For a while I could only name very few people among my acquaintance who'd gotten the virus, but now I know several, and the kids all have friends who've had it.  I'd been so thankful, and so pleasantly surprised, that COVID hadn't touched us directly yet.  Ben and I don't mingle indoors in public much, and when we do we're masked unless we're eating.  But the kids are at school every day.  They wear masks whenever they're indoors, but still, we know that they have a higher chance of being exposed than Ben and I do.

So I wasn't completely surprised when I got an email on Monday, Nov. 16th that Jack was potentially exposed to COVID; it was probably inevitable.  His school does a great job of making the school environment as safe as possible: only half the students are on campus at a time, so Cat and Jack have fewer than 12 students in any class; the desks are spaced apart in the classrooms and the teachers use seating charts.  Therefore, when I got an email that Jack someone in Jack's class tested positive, it was an email that was only sent to the kids in the class(es) who sat near this other student (who were all wearing masks in class).

We all quarantined until we got test results back.  On Tuesday morning (which might have been the 1-year anniversary of the first case of COVID-19 accoroding to this article, though most people list Dec. 31st), Cat and Jack both got tested using a saliva sample.  I was so glad we found a facility that not only offered the saliva test - who wants someone to push a stick up their nose? - but we would also get results in 1-2 days instead of the 3-5 days it takes to get results from the nasal probe.

Our two days of quarantine were kind of nice: the kids did as much school work as they could from home, but also played together inside and in the back yard, and we watched a couple of movies (loved Enola Holmes!).

We got the results late Wednesday night - Cat and Jack were both negative.  Woohoo!  Everyone went back to school on Thursday.

We've been incredibly blessed to not be sick, and really to not even have general cold-weather sickness symptoms that would keep kids home from school (except for that day Cat had a little cough and didn't go to church).  Even though this virus has had a direct impact on my everyday life for over 8 months now, I still find it surreal to walk around and see people wearing masks, to greet a friend with an elbow bump, and to wonder whether it's safe to attend Sacrament Meeting or not.  With news of three effective vaccines in the final stages of testing, it's nice to think that all of this might just end one day.  Is it possible that 2021 will have the opposite trajectory of 2020?