covid vaccine trauma and afterwards

[mindstalk]

I'll put most of this in a cut because some people who can't get vaccine don't like hearing about others getting it, but first some resources:

https://vaccinefinder.org/

https://carbonhealth.com/covid-19-vaccines/los-angeles

https://myturn.ca.gov/

https://www.kroger.com/rx/covid-vaccine

https://www.riteaid.com/pharmacy/apt-scheduler


So, after hearing that LA was opening eligibility a few days earlier than Apr 15, I went looking. Lots of places near me (like the Ralph's 5 minutes walk away) that *should* have it but were full. Lots of places full elsewhere too.

I'd heard of people finding new slots after midnight, so around 1 AM of the 13th I looked on carbonhealth and found something a 20 minute Lyft ride away, for the 14th. Grumble grumble about being in a car with someone but I booked it.

Then during the day of the 13th I found a Rite-Aid slot for that evening, 18 minute walk away! I booked that and canceled the other.

So I walked over last night. Website had said to go to the vaccine area. There was no visible area. Nothing to attract someone who supposedly had a very specific 7:03 PM appointment, one of slots every 8 minutes. Regular workers told me pharmacy. I couldn't easily bull my way up to question one of the pharmacy workers. Customers told me to stand in the Drop Off line. This moved literally one person in 30 minutes. As far as I could tell it was just form filling, with no practice of "go fill your form out somewhere else while I help other customers." It wasn't clear that the Pick Up line was moving much either, not that I had good visibility. I eventually became unsure that I trusted these people to stick things in me, and left after 30 minutes. Again, the line wasn't so much slow as utterly glacial and I couldn't even tell if I was in the right line.

I then discovered that they'd called me 10 minutes after my appointment; not anticipating this, my phone had been quiet. I tried calling back the number they said. Over and over and over again, right away and somewhat later. Did they ever pick up? They did not.

So I came home, went back online, and of course all the abundant carbonhealth slots I'd seen were all gone by then. As were the "could walk to it but it's next week" slots I'd seen somewhere.

So, trauma. Standing 30 minutes deep indoors when I've spent months avoiding even going indoor at all, and it's a pharmacy to boot where sick people go, and I didn't even get a shot for it.

No open slots anywhere even after midnight, this time.

But!

During today's stand-up meeting, I was multitasking and looking again at carbonhealth. And there were slots open! Today! Same place, even. So I took it, and accepted depending on a 20 minute ride. Resentfully, because there are multiple places near me, if any had slots. Also with some more trauma on the ride, because when I asked my driver if he'd gotten vaccinated he said that he wasn't going to. Asian guy, too! Worried about side-effects. Then he kept trying to talk to me.

But finally I got to the site, on USC campus, and that was pretty good. It was on the ground floor of a big garage, with semi-open walls; not as naturally ventilated as a park or parking lot, but better than ordinary buildings. The system felt competent and organized. I was there pretty early, to avoid last-minute "where do I go?" problems, but they had me go in and sit down anyway. Waited a bit for shots to thaw, while a line built up, guess I got there in a lull; was told "don't worry", that once they had the shots in hand the line would get processed quickly.

I commiserated with my future shooter (herself vaccinated) about Brazil and Bolsonaro, whom she considers worse than Trump.

Got shot. Waited 15 minutes in another part of the garage, for allergy reactions, felt fine. I was using my stopwatch but actually received an automated text after 15 minutes saying that I could leave. Well-organized. Like, I didn't even see the equipment they'd need to note that I'd been vaccinated and would need a a text, but it was very precise. I didn't actually time when I got jabbed, but I texted Jane at 14:35, and received the text at 14:49, which is 19 minutes after my appointment time, so I assume it wasn't just "15 minutes after appointment time."

Next jab in 4 weeks.

Discovered Exposition Park was right there, with a rose garden, and since I'd invested the time and covid exposure risk to get there, I told work I was taking the afternoon off to literally go smell the roses. This was literally the first time I've been beyond walking distance of my residence since March 2020.

Lyft back was un-traumatic. Way more expensive, $26 for a 20 "Lyft Preferred" (new thing, figured I'd try it) but I think my first ride was bizarrely cheap, $12 for a 20 minute ride, Lyft/Uber are usually about $1/minute. Maybe there was some vaccine discount I didn't notice, or a "we haven't seen you ina while" discount. Or maybe just the rush hour rates, I got home at 5 PM, and the fares look lower now in both directions.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>and it's a pharmacy to boot where *sick people go*

God, I know, right? I don't think I could *ever* work at a pharmacy, TBH.

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I'm an ""essential worker"" who can't really afford grocery delivery but who managed to get her hands on a P100 respirator three months ago, and reading about the shit you went through is...hard to put into words. I *very much* remember a time when ~25 hours of each fortnight were suffused with fear, every breath a cost-benefit analysis. I remember the dread leading up to each outing, the irritability afterwards. And yet also it feels like a whole other life, now that I have some proper respiratory protection that filters out 99.97% of trauma.

I'm sorry you weren't able to have that in time. I hope you never again have to face down a plague with inadequate PPE.

[mindstalk]

Thanks.

I actually got some elastomeric respirators a while back: medium and large, N95 and P100 filters. I haven't been able to convince myself they're airtight enough to feel safe going inside; they may do more than a surgical, or even surgical+brace (fixthemask) but that's not the same as "this is no longer an unnecessary risk". I'd also noticed smelling stuff on a trial walk, though I see you say that's not necessarily a warning sign.

Plus the large one really does rattle like Darth Vader when I talk, and god forbid you should need to take a drink or blow your nose, especially while wearing glasses... Even with the valve it still gets muggy around my mouth.

I did think about wearing them on the vaccine trips, but ended up using a braced mask, which I could leave loose on my walk.

I did grocery delivery only once, yeah it's steep. I've been doing curbside pickup instead; they seem to have added a note to themselves that I stand outside the door rather than being in a car since they haven't asked my parking space in a while. :) For my store, there's no fee if getting $35 or more. It does change my shopping patterns, I can't just go get something, but it's worked out.

Anyway, I'm glad the elastomers worked for you!

[brin_bellway]

>>I'd also noticed smelling stuff on a trial walk, though I see you say that's not necessarily a warning sign.

Yeah, it might be worth seeking out the nuisance-vapour filters just for the psychological benefits. After years of pollen masks, I've got "judgment of a mask's quality by how much it dulls your sense of smell" pretty ingrained into my psyche (a good surgical mask or even a well-sealed cloth mask *will* noticeably decrease the amount of scent that gets through, while a poor quality or fit will have a much smaller (if any) effect). It is deeply reassuring to walk into work and not smell the change at all.

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>>surgical+brace (fixthemask)

Ooh, neat.

I learned a few months back about the "use a Band-Aid to replace/augment a nonexistent/inadequate mask nosepiece" trick. It's been very helpful, helpful enough that I ended up buying a roll of medical tape so I wouldn't have to keep burning through Band-Aids every time I used a non-respirator mask. (Which I still do if I'm just going out for a walk, and I plan to wear them for [public transit] and [indoor public spaces during cold-and-flu season] during non-plague times from now on.)

Still, it might be nice to have a non-consumable intermediate-between-masks-and-respirators option, especially since at this rate I suspect there will come a day when my pollen sensitivity gets so severe that taping only the nose isn't a good enough seal.

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>>god forbid you should need to take a drink

By the time I got a respirator I'd spent the past ten months refusing to take my mask off in public for anything but alcohol ID (and that only once), and my body had adapted to going shift-long stretches without food and water.

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>>Even with the valve it still gets muggy around my mouth.

Huh. I find it very dry, much dryer than masklessness. I wonder if that's part of the nuisance-vapour filter.

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>>Plus the large one really does rattle like Darth Vader when I talk

I have adopted a habit of showing grocery employees a clipboard with my question/request written on it, rather than trying to do it in voice. My conversations at work are scripted enough and have enough opportunities for supplementing with gestures/pointing that people usually don't have much trouble figuring out what I'm saying, although answering the phone (with the extra layer of muffling a phone brings) is nearly impossible.

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I experimented with curbside pickup during the post-Christmas plague surge. The *explicit* fee is very small, but you end up paying full price for a lot more of your shopping than you normally would. Or at least, than I normally would: I've heard price-matching is much less available in the States than it is here, and I enjoy financial optimisation so I'm pretty thorough about my pursuit of deals. (At one point a couple fortnightly trips ago, I ran some ballpark figures in my head and estimated I'd saved about 20 CAD that trip in price-matching alone, all of it on household staples.)

(Also, non-financially except in the "time is money" sense, for curbside pickup you have to work out and explicitly state all of your backup plans ("if they're out of X, get Y; if they're out of Z, skip it") in advance. And god help you if you have any more *complicated* backup plans, that kick in only after *multiple* prerequisites.)

[mindstalk]

Price matching: you mean "hey store X, story Y is cheaper, match it"? I've heard of that but never tried it.

Ordering delivery the prices were higher than store prices, too, This hasn't been an obvious problem with Ralph's. Well, may last bread was more expensive ($2.50 vs. $1.99) but I don't know if maybe they've actually raised the list price of bread recently. Selection is less: one kind of bread I knew they had wasn't listed (but I could sometimes get it by asking for it in the substitutions, and it seems added now) and the gourmet cheese table is just not there. But I'm not missing anything I must have, or couldn't get via Amazon (like better bulk aspirin.)

And yeah, there's the substitution problem; they'll guess something if not specified, or I can specify. Hasn't been a huge problem. I can also call to talk things out if needed. Not perfect but works good enough to keep me out of the store.

[brin_bellway]

>>Price matching: you mean "hey store X, story Y is cheaper, match it"? I've heard of that but never tried it.

You show the cashier a sale flyer with the item in it and they give the item to you at the other store's sale price.

(Flyers have mostly gone paperless now, so these days you show them a flyer app. Flipp has a better search function but Reebee is better at coping with unstable or nonexistent Internet access: I generally use the desktop-browser version of Flipp when writing up the grocery list and the Reebee app for showing the cashier when I get there. Reebee is Canada-only, but Flipp has an option for American flyers.)

Almost all downmarket grocery stores in Canada price-match (Walmart recently stopped: there was a big uproar, and other downmarket groceries started pushing price-matching even harder to try to scoop up Walmart's lost business). Downmarket subsidiaries of big chains will even price-match their own company's other subsidiaries, so you can often get store-brand items on price-match.

AFAIK, the only American store that price-matches groceries is Target.

The occasional posts I see from Americans about the hidden costs of bargain-hunting make significantly more sense when you realise that in many cases, in order to exploit six different stores' sales in America you have to *actually go to six different stores*. Fucking primitive, TBH.

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>>Ordering delivery the prices were higher than store prices, too

Oh yeah, we had that problem with Costco mail-orders. They tell you how big the *explicit* delivery fee (for orders under $75) is, but there's also an *implicit* delivery fee which is much harder to measure.

[mindstalk]

Thanks.
That sort of price-matching always sounded weird to me. Stores have different supply chains and rents, why should they have the same price? And convenience is worth paying for.

"Hey, the store across town has this for a dollar less."
"Cool, if you feel your time is worth less than a dollar, drive over there."

But then I saw this article, arguing that price-matching only *looks* super-competitive, but is actually anti-competitive. "Don't cut your prices or we'll all suffer, and you won't even get more customers out of it." A way to have a cartel without any illegal price-fixing talks.

Wiki agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-based_selling#Price-matching_guarantees

And a longer explanation of the game theory.

[brin_bellway]

The [sort of people who think convenience is worth paying for *and* have enough money to pay for it] probably aren't shopping at stores literally named things like "No Frills" and "Food Basics". I've done worse things for a dollar than drive across town. I've certainly done worse things for $20 than drive across town to buy 20 of a non-perishable staple.

(Well, driving *in particular* wouldn't be worth a one-dollar savings because the transport itself would cost more than that. But for a one-dollar *profit*, yeah I've had worse gigs.)

I figured price-matching was more of a price-discrimination thing. If you're so sensitive to prices that you'll go as far as researching every possible sale price for each item, they give you a discount to keep you as a customer. As with many areas of life, people who just show up and take what they're given pay more. (As, for that matter, do people who can't afford to tie up capital and storage space stocking up on enough sale goods to last until the next sale.)

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>>Stores have different supply chains

How different are they, really? If, say, the cattle farmers produce a bumper crop, wouldn't all stores find themselves with large quantities of cheap beef? I would expect one store's "we have a glut of this item, let's put it on sale for a while until that goes away" to be correlated with other stores having the same problem.

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It seems like a lot of the problems Wikipedia points out are more of a thing with appliances, which are not the central example of price-matching in Canada but *are* the central example in America (and, I gather from friends, Australia).

An issue that I don't see mentioned in the links (but which I might have overlooked) is that people *don't buy appliances very often*. As such, skills/knowledge that are only useful when buying appliances would be much less developed than skills/knowledge for grocery shopping, and people would therefore be less likely to actually take an appliance store up on its offer.

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Re: cartels, it's interesting to note the combination of a country where price-matching is common but where a large fraction of the population lives near a border with a non-price-matching country. Like, if Canadian prices get bad enough we'll just shop in America, at least with non-perishables.

Indeed, we already do this with--for example--canned tuna, which costs about CAD$0.50 a can less at Wegmans. So if you show up every few months and buy 200...

(okay, yes, *right now* cross-border shopping trips are forbidden, but I expect this to be a temporary state of affairs)

(*Some* things are cheaper in Buffalo, but others are more expensive. And I've noticed there seems to be less need for American grocery trips as the years go by: Canadian pasta dropped in price until it was cheaper than American pasta, *full-price* Cheez-Its are more expensive in Canada but the sales are better, etc. Not sure how that factors into the cartel thing.)

[mindstalk]

I think sales/coupons in general are a price-discrimination thing. People more sensitive to prices will make the effort of clipping coupons or waiting for sales. I still think price-matching seems more like tacit collusion in an oligopoly.

Granted, tacit collusion combined with the habitual random sales for price-discrimination of the supermarket sector seems like an odd combination, I don't have an intuition for how those interact.

Supply chain: mmm, maybe. Depends on the goods. Anyway, rent can certainly differ, though I'd expect a downtown store to avoid price-matching with suburban stores.

US as a competitive check on Canadian markets is an interesting idea. I don't have a good sense for how easy border-hopping was.

[brin_bellway]

>>I'd expect a downtown store to avoid price-matching with suburban stores.

Yeah. No Frills and Food Basics live up to their names, but Valu-Mart *really* does not.

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>>I don't have a good sense for how easy border-hopping was.

Fairly easy, at least if you have a suitable car in which to lug it all back. Can't really fit 200 cans of tuna + 15 club packs of chicken + another couple hundred bucks of various other groceries in a truck puppy, and certainly not a bicycle or backpack. I don't drive, and I expect there will come a day when no drivers remain in my household and I can no longer go grocery shopping in New York. (Although, I don't know, maybe we can carpool with friends or something. I don't think I'd bother just for myself because I don't eat tuna and don't eat much chicken (though I'd miss Wegmans peanut butter, which costs about the same these days but tastes better), but the household overlap between drivers and tuna-eaters is not 100%, so it's very possible that future household compositions will involve high demand for tuna but no car.)

It was probably unusually easy for me because I was showing up at off-peak times and flashing [the passport of the country I was entering] *both ways* (if you're a dual citizen travelling between your two countries, showing a different passport in each direction is not just permitted but strongly encouraged), but I gather it's still not hard even for Canadians lacking those advantages.

(Back when we were mere permanent residents and were showing U.S. passports both ways...talking to the border guard maybe took *slightly* longer, but like, a minute instead of half a minute, that sort of thing. Small enough that it might be a coincidence that it seems to be even faster now.)

Duties per se are rare to nonexistent on personal-use goods (except dairy, which on the one hand is absolutely a cartel thing but on the other hand Canadian dairy tastes better; we don't bother much with the small American dairy allowance and just maintain a stock of Canadian cheese and butter through sales, though we do sometimes pick up a quart or two of American cream while we're there); *occasionally* you have to pay sales tax on some stuff twice (once to the States and once to Canada), but most of the time they don't even do that IME.

Limits are per-person, so if you're stocking for a family you should bring said family with you. (Besides, they can help find items and push carts. Four hundred dollars of tuna isn't going to move itself.)

[mindstalk]

I was amused in Montreal to find that the cheeses advertised their milkfat. Given the French heritage, I wasn't sure if this was to enable avoiding high fat or to enable seeking it out. Works either way... dunno if that was a Quebec thing or a Canada thing.