Quarantine. Pandemic. The Unknown. A dentites review, one year later.
I remember being ordered to go home that day. ‘We’re shutting it down, and we can’t do anything about it…’ my partner muttered.
It seemed surreal seeing highways devoid of traffic at peak hours. The costco checkout line appeared similar to entry to kickoff Sunday for an NFL game. Full of angst and fervor.
A mix of ‘is this real?’ ‘who here might have this?’ and ‘do I have enough toilet paper and non-perishable food to enjoy the end of days?’ sloshed in our minds as quarantine came to fruition.
The information trickle from the higher ups only ratcheted up the tension of ‘what do we do next?’ Mask or no mask? Wipe everything down? Do we saran wrap Grandma and attach an oxygen mask to protect her?
The shift from existential questioning would soon transition to ‘how do we cope and function with this new paradigm we’re dealing with?’
It used to be a level III mask would be plenty. Now it had to be N95. Ok maybe not enough. Let’s do two. Aerosols are very very bad. Throw on a gown and a protective shield. If you can, put a condom over your head and poke three holes for your eyes and nose.
Did the Zoom teledentistry actually work out? I’m pretty sure patients who have already done their own self-examinations will still try telling you what and how to do dentistry. I don’t need them to do that over a Zoom call too.
I’d like to point out, after a year of our hygienists sucking down aerosols, their infection rates are no greater than the rest of the population. They must have the immunity of a level 5 bioweapons lab.
And let’s ask ourselves this question. Why did we go into the quarantine in the first place?
If I remember correctly, it was to help our hospitals catch up on supplies and to ‘flatten the curve’. Something I have to do with all my crowns that come back too high…
It seems a year later, we’re on track to do just that. R0’s are less than 1 in most states, trending in the right direction. Supplies are somewhat constrained, but there is a manufacturing push to continue to balance the demand.
We’ve coped in our office, complained less about the PPE artificially making us into emphysema laden providers. We’ve refocused on how much everyone is earning on Unemployment Benefits and we can’t hire for our short staff because of that fact… don’t get me started!
Patients are waking up and feeling confident to see the whites of your eyes before you inject them, because they won’t get to see any other part of you.
Now, a year removed from all this started. We have much more information. The biggest risk factor to death is age and health. If older or fatter, and worse, both, it’s not looking good is it?
We have a few vaccines to choose from. That should substantially increase herd immunity with the already covid sniffers that had it. R0 should continue to fall.
The virus doesn’t seem to like sunlight, at least that’s the conclusion I’m drawing as the number of cases were least in the Summer months around the world. Or maybe we’re just better at shouting through our muffle masks and staying distant to each other when we can be outside.
And after a spike in deaths during the winter, we’re trending in the right direction.
There’s a lot of positive’s with the first day of Spring arriving this last week. I’m going to keep the endgame in mind. We can be proud of ourselves. We’ve been through a lot. Hopefully we’ve learned a few things along the way. I
’ll always know that I go through a single roll of toilet paper (500 squares 2-ply) in about 41.6 days. Don’t ask, just enjoy, and yes I did take the time to actually calculate that.
Thrive on my friend.
Lam