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

PALO ALTO – After nearly a year of lockdown, Moldovan retirement community residents have set aside their masks over the past week, filling exterior tables and celebrating their newfound liberation.

“Free again! Free again! Free again! Says Judy Kligler (88) to toast the friends she has hardly seen since March.

“She’s going to burst into a song if you do not watch it,” said Rina Humphers, 85.

It is the lucky two-doers, the elderly who are at the top of the vaccination list of COVID-19, who have completed both lap rounds. While it may take weeks or months before all of their pandemic restrictions are lifted, they are ready to party.

Mariachis performed on Monday. Belly dancers Friday.

“I’m speechless,” 94-year-old Sam Silverman said as the belly dancer passed by his desk. “She said she was a married woman. This put cold water on the whole thing. ”

Although there have been more than 500,000 deaths across the country and more than 50,000 in California over the past week, the elderly who were most vulnerable to the devastation of the virus realize that their fears are largely behind them. So is the isolation. They survived the pandemic. And once again, at nursing homes and senior communities across the Bay, they are beginning to embrace the simple joy of life.

Starting Monday – a full two weeks after their second dose of Pfizer vaccine – they will be adding bunco, bridge and mahjong and outdoor lunches and dinners to Moldova’s growing social calendar.

‘I’m already started a dance card. I call it my hug card, ”said Jackie Hamburg, 75, who burst into tears after her second dose, thankful she was spared the virus. “I already have three people for hugs on March 1st.”

The vaccinations could not be soon enough for the 210 residents of Moldova, a luxury retired community in Palo Alto, where mostly Jewish elderly people live together who celebrate Shabbat and other holidays. In a community accustomed to daily outings to museums and movies and Trader Joe’s, many were isolated in their rooms during most of the pandemic, a debilitating situation that led to soul-destroying loneliness among the elderly everywhere.

As in many tragic cases at 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 Moldova to die of COVID, and one of only five residents to receive it.

In the course of the pandemic, eight staff members tested positive but were quickly quarantined. In general, the elderly living at Moldavian Residences were much happier than most. Across the country, coronavirus deaths at long-term care facilities, which include nursing homes and nursing homes, accounted for about 35 percent of all COVID deaths, according to The Atlantic’s COVID detection project and largely confirmed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Although relief facilities in particular are not subject to federal reporting requirements, and accurate data can be difficult to assess, the coronavirus was accused of more than 170,000 deaths in long-term care facilities on February 18.

In a race for the vaccine, Moldova CEO Elyse Gerson began linking her commitments at Walgreens from December 20 to set up the first vaccine clinic in Moldova’s auditorium. It did not come for more than a month.

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

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

Like the elderly across the country, the couple – and the entire Moldovan community – were so cautious and gave up so much over the past year.

Although many residents walked around the campus daily – and small groups would sometimes gather for a social-distant outdoor cocktail – people found few social shops in wheelchairs and walkers or with debilitating ailments. Meetings in the email room became spontaneous moments of joy, as well as cries from one balcony to the next.

But the dining room remains closed and the elevator is limited to one passenger. The nursery next door, where children’s laughter was blowing through the courtyards, was silent for months.

“Just getting people out of bed every day was the focus for us,” 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, who wrote a 2012 study on the subject and underwent ongoing studies during the pandemic. ‘I can not actually write as a cause of death loneliness. It is not considered physiologically possible. But what we know about how loneliness and isolation can affect health – dementia, cardiovascular health and our functional abilities – can weaken us more. Everyone actually causes more deaths. ‘

To help those who suffer the most, social worker Karen Lerner was appointed to Moldova 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 do not want to end it like that? That’s why I moved here to not be alone, ” Lerner said. ‘It’s a big problem when you’re 98 – living the last year of your life without your friends and family next to you. Our goal is to make sure no one feels that way anymore. ”

Staff members did their best to add engaging programming – guided meditations, ‘excursions’ to New York and New Orleans, cooking demonstrations, ‘laughing yoga’. Last spring, they delivered tomato seedlings to grow on balconies. Last summer, they served ice cream cones outside. But most programs were virtual, and residents navigated on their computer screens to fit in. It has not yet been easy for those with hearing and vision problems and those who are engaged in technology.

Even the healthiest experience loneliness.

As Al Dorogusker, 85, put it: “the walls in my apartment fell back about eight feet.”

“I’m eating with Lester Holt and Chris Cuomo,” Evelyn Katchman, 88, said of the appointment with the television news outlets.

“I eat with Perry Mason,” says Hamburg, who sets up her ‘hug’. “They are our best friends now.”

In the East Bay, during the harsh exclusion last spring at the Merrill Gardens retirement community in Lafayette, “we had people who just lost their heads in their rooms,” said Denise DiBetta, director of community relations. “Even people who are considered high functioning have become depressed.”

Staff members set up folding chairs outside the apartment’s doors for Friday happy hours, where residents picked up snacks and drinks from a stray bar cart and played bingo in the hallways.

From 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,” DiBetta said, “but you can imagine with senior ears, there was a lot of shouting.”

Aid facilities such as Moldova and Merrill Gardens are following clues from their provinces on what sanctions can be lifted – but for people who have already received the double-dose vaccine, there are so far few directions from public health officials.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet released guidelines for vaccination collection, but Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an interview on CNN on Thursday that vaccines can meet individuals with minimal risk.