Bay Area seniors celebrate second COVID vaccine with margaritas and belly dancers

PALO ALTO – After nearly a year of lockdown, residents of Moldaw’s retirement community put their masks aside last week, crowded outdoor tables and celebrated their new release.

“Free again! Free again! Free again!” said Judy Kligler, 88, toasting friends she had barely seen since last March.

“She’s going to burst into the song if you don’t watch her,” Rina Humphers, 85, sang.

These are the lucky second dosers, the elderly at the top of the COVID-19 vaccination list who have completed both rounds of vaccines. While it may take weeks or months before all of their pandemic restrictions are lifted, they are up to party.

Mariachis played on Monday. Belly dancers Friday.

“I’m speechless,” said Sam Silverman, 94, as the belly dancer walked past her table. “She said she was married. It put cold water on the whole thing.

Although deaths across the country topped 500,000 and California topped 50,000 last week, the elderly most vulnerable to the ravages of the virus are realizing that with the vaccination their fears are largely behind them. The same goes for isolation. They survived the pandemic. And once again, in the retirement homes and senior communities across the Bay Area, they are starting to embrace the simple joys of life.

Starting Monday – two full weeks after their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine – they will add bunco, bridge and mahjong and alfresco dining for lunch and dinner to Moldaw’s growing social calendar.

“I have already started a dance card. I call it my hug card, ”said Jackie Hamburg, 75, who broke down in tears while playing a crossword puzzle after her second dose, thankful she was spared the virus. “I already have three people scheduled for hugs on March 1.”

Vaccinations couldn’t come soon enough for the 210 residents of Moldaw, an upscale retirement community in Palo Alto that’s mostly home to elderly Jews who celebrate Shabbat and other holidays together. In a community accustomed to daily trips to museums, movies and Trader Joe’s, many have been isolated in their rooms for most of the pandemic, a debilitating situation that has led to heartbreaking loneliness among older people around the world.

As with many tragic cases in long-term care facilities, the vaccine came too late for 96-year-old Herb Leifer. Last month, the retired physicist became the first and only Moldaw resident to die of COVID and one of five residents to contract it.

During the pandemic, eight staff members tested positive but were quickly quarantined. Yet on the whole, the seniors living in Moldaw residences have been much luckier than most. Nationwide, coronavirus deaths in long-term care facilities, which include assisted living and nursing homes, accounted for 35% of all COVID deaths, according to The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project and widely confirmed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Although assisted living residences in particular are not subject to federal reporting requirements and precise data is difficult to assess, the coronavirus has been blamed for more than 170,000 deaths as of February 18 in long-term care facilities. duration.

In a race for the vaccine, Moldaw CEO Elyse Gerson began calling her connections at Walgreens from December 20 to set up the first vaccination clinic in the Moldaw auditorium. He hasn’t come for over a month.

Just nine days before the first vaccine was given here on January 27, Leifer, who edited the community newsletter and was otherwise in good health, tested positive for the virus. He died on February 6.

“It was so close to getting the vaccine, it’s cruel,” said his widow, Elizabeth Leifer, 93, who met her husband in 1946 as a teenager and he was delivering kosher meat At her place. “We have been married for 72 years. It really is not enough.

Like older people across the country, the couple – and the entire Moldawan community – had been so careful and had given up so much over the past year.

While many residents enjoyed the daily walks on campus – and small groups sometimes gathered for socially distanced outdoor cocktails – people in wheelchairs and walkers or with debilitating illnesses found little social outlet. Meetings in the mail room became spontaneous moments of joy, as did shouting from balcony to balcony.

But the dining room remains closed and the elevator has been limited to one passenger. Adding to the oppression, the neighboring preschool, where children’s laughter floated through the courtyards, was closed for months.

“Just getting people out of bed every day has been our main goal,” Gerson said.

Geriatric experts are convinced that loneliness is also deadly.

“I think some people die directly from loneliness and isolation,” said Dr. Carla Perissinotto, associate professor of geriatrics at UC San Francisco, author of a 2012 study on the subject and who has been studying for more. the pandemic. “I can’t really write as a cause of the loneliness of death. It is not considered physiologically possible. But what we do know about how loneliness and isolation can affect health – worsening dementia, heart health, and our functional abilities – we can become more fragile. All cause more mortality, in fact.

To help those who are suffering the most, social worker Karen Lerner was hired in Moldaw last fall.

“What do you say to a 98 year old man who says, ‘This could be my last year of life, this could be the last month of my life, and I don’t want to end it like this? That’s why I moved here, so that I wouldn’t be alone, ”Lerner said. “It’s a real concern at 98: living the last year of your life without your friends and family next to you. Our goal is to make no one feel this way anymore. “

The staff have done their best to add interesting programming – guided meditations, New York and New Orleans “excursions”, cooking demonstrations, “laughter yoga”. Last spring they delivered tomato plants to grow on balconies. Last summer they served ice cream cones outside. But most of the programs were virtual, with residents browsing their computer screens to connect. It has not been easy for those with hearing and vision problems who are baffled by the technology.

Even the healthiest live in solitude.

As 85-year-old Al Dorogusker puts it: “The walls of my apartment have retreated about eight feet.”

“I eat with Lester Holt and Chris Cuomo,” Evelyn Katchman, 88, said of late night dates with TV hosts.

“I eat with Perry Mason,” said Hamburg, who drafted his “hug card”. “They are our best friends now.”

In the East Bay, during the brutal lockdown last spring at the Merrill Gardens retirement community in Lafayette, “we had people losing their minds in their rooms,” said director of community relations Denise DiBetta. “Even people considered to be high functioning suffered from depression.”

Staff members set up folding chairs outside apartment doors for Friday happy hours, where residents chose snacks and libations from a mobile bar cart and played bingo in the hallways.

Starting last fall, they finally opened up the dining room, but unless you were part of a couple, only one person was allowed at each table.

“They can have a conversation,” DiBetta said, “but you can imagine with senior ears, there’s a lot of screaming.”

Assisted living centers like Moldaw and Merrill Gardens are following advice from their counties on penalties that can be lifted – but for people who have already received a double dose of the vaccine, public health officials don’t have until present hardly been informed.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to release guidelines for gathering vaccinated people, but on Thursday, Dr Anthony Fauci said in an interview on CNN that vaccinated people can assemble individually with a minimal risk.