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

PALO ALTO – After nearly a year of blockade, residents of the Moldaw retirement community put their masks aside last week, packed the outdoor tables and celebrated their newfound release.

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

“She’ll start singing if you don’t watch it,” interrupted Rina Humphers, 85.

These are the lucky ones who take the second dose, the elderly people near the top of the COVID-19 vaccination list who completed both rounds of vaccination. Although it may take weeks or months before all restrictions on the pandemic are lifted, they are ready for the party.

Mariachis performed on Monday. Belly dancers on Friday.

“I’m at a loss for words,” said Sam Silverman, 94, as the belly dancer passed her desk. “She said that she is a married woman. This put cold water on the entire business. “

Although deaths across the country reached 500,000 and in California it exceeded 50,000 last week, the elderly most vulnerable to the virus’s devastation are realizing that with vaccination their fears are largely behind them. Isolation too. They survived the pandemic. And again, in nursing homes and retirement communities across the bay area, they are beginning to embrace the simple joys of living.

Starting on Monday – two full weeks after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine – they will add bunco, bridge and mahjong and outdoor meals for lunch and dinner to the growing social calendar in Moldaw.

“I have already started a dance card. I’m calling it my hug card, ”said Jackie Hamburg, 75, who started crying while playing crosswords after her second dose, grateful to have been spared by the virus. “I already have three people scheduled for hugs on March 1st.”

Vaccination could not come soon for the 210 residents of Moldaw, a luxury retirement community in Palo Alto that is home to elderly Jews who celebrate Shabbat and other holidays together. In a community that was used to day trips to museums, movies and Trader Joe’s, many were isolated in their rooms during most of the pandemic, a debilitating situation that led to overwhelming loneliness among the elderly everywhere.

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 resident of Moldaw to die from COVID and one of only five residents to contract it.

During the course of the pandemic, eight team members tested positive, but were quickly quarantined. Still, in general, the elderly who live in the Moldaw Homes have been much luckier than most. Across the country, deaths from coronavirus in long-term care facilities, which include assisted living and nursing homes, were responsible for an astonishing 35 percent of all COVID deaths, according to the COVID Screening Project. Atlantic and widely confirmed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Although assisted living facilities in particular are not subject to federal reporting requirements and accurate data is difficult to assess, the coronavirus was responsible for more than 170,000 deaths as of February 18 in long-term care facilities.

In a race for the vaccine, Moldaw’s executive director, Elyse Gerson, began calling her contacts at Walgreens from December 20 to set up the first vaccine clinic in the Moldaw auditorium. It didn’t happen for more than a month.

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

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

Like the elderly across the country, the couple – and the entire Moldaw community – were very careful and gave up many things in the previous year.

While many residents enjoyed daily walks on campus – and small groups occasionally met for socially distant cocktails outdoors – those in wheelchairs and walkers or with debilitating illnesses found few social media. The meetings in the correspondence room became spontaneous moments of joy, as well as screams from one balcony to another.

But the dining room remains closed and the elevator has been limited to one passenger. To add to the oppression, the preschool next door, where children’s laughter floated across the yards, was closed for months.

“Getting people out of bed every day has been the focus for us,” said Gerson.

Geriatric experts are convinced that loneliness is also deadly.

“I think some people are dying directly from loneliness and isolation,” said Dr. Carla Perissinotto, associate professor of geriatrics at UC San Francisco, who authored a 2012 study on the subject and has studies underway during the pandemic. “I cannot write as a cause of the loneliness of death. It is not considered physiologically possible. But what we know about how loneliness and isolation can affect health – worsening dementia, cardiovascular health and our functional abilities – we can become more fragile. They all cause more mortality, actually. “

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

“What would you say to a 98-year-old man who says, ‘This may be my last year, this may be the last month that I am alive, and I don’t want to end like this? That’s why I moved here, so as not to be alone, ‘”said Lerner. “This is a real concern when you are 98 years old – to live the last year of your life without your friends and family by your side. Our goal is to ensure that no one else feels this way. “

Team members did their best to add an engaging program – guided meditations, “excursions” to New York and New Orleans, cooking demonstrations, “laughter yoga”. Last spring, they delivered tomato seedlings to grow on the balconies. Last summer, they served ice cream cones outside. But most programs are virtual, with residents browsing computer screens to tune in. This has not been easy for those with vision and hearing problems and is baffled by the technology.

Even the healthiest ones are experiencing loneliness.

As Al Dorogusker, 85, said: “the walls of my apartment have receded about 2.5 meters”.

“I eat with Lester Holt and Chris Cuomo,” said Evelyn Katchman, 88, of evening meetings with television presenters.

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

In East Bay, during the difficult blockade last spring at the Merrill Gardens retirement community in Lafayette, “we had people who were losing their heads in their rooms,” said director of community relations Denise DiBetta. “Even people who were considered high-functioning were in a spiral of depression.”

Team members placed folding chairs outside apartment doors for Friday’s happy hour, where residents chose snacks and drinks from a mobile bar cart and played bingo in the hallways.

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

“They can have a conversation,” said DiBetta, “but you can imagine, with experienced ears, there are a lot of screams going on.”

Assisted residences like Moldaw and Merrill Gardens are following their county’s guidelines on which sanctions can be lifted – but for people who have already received double doses of the vaccine, there is little guidance from public health officials so far.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet released guidelines for the collection of vaccinated people, but on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview with CNN that vaccinated people can meet individually with minimal risk .