The American Mall : Dead as the Dinosaur
In March of this year, Neelu Joseph received a flurry of text messages from her mother, who was at the going-out-of-business sale at their local Macy’s. She was floored—not by the deals but because her childhood mall, Metrocenter Mall in Glendale, Arizona, was losing another big box store. Sears exited a couple of years ago, and the mall had steadily lost tenants like the Gap, H & M, and Abercrombie and Fitch. Her teenage self would barely recognize the place today.
The Doctor Who Got Fired For Using Left-over Vaccine*
The Georgia doctor looked at the clock ticking loudly on the wall in his office, with a staccato, steady beat. Twenty minutes past 5 p.m. He had six hours.
Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened for his last patient on this blustery February day, he had to find ten eligible people for its remaining doses before the valuable medicine—more precious than liquid gold, he’d been told—expired. In six hours.
Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his office outside Savannah. Some were acquaintances; others strangers. A bed-ridden octogenarian woman. A mother with a special-needs child who used a ventilator. A man in his 80s with dementia.
The Unequal Scramble for Vaccines
As soon as Los Angeles County began offering Covid vaccines to residents 65 and older, Sonia Khatri, whose non-profit agency ran a medical clinic, noticed something different.
“Suddenly our clinic was full of white people,” said Dr. Khatri, the head of Asha Kiran, which provided services to the poor. “We’ve never had that before. We serve people who are disproportionately colored—Indians, Pakistanis, Mexicans, some African-Americans.” She adjusted the steel-rimmed thick eyeglasses on her nose, which everybody said made her look like Gandhi.
There\’s A New Demon in Town: Lord Corona
Good thing it was her shift that night.
Reema was sweaty and grumpy. In full PPE (gown, N95 mask, face shield, and gloves) for the past five hours. Every time she exhaled her glasses and face shield fogged up. She tasted stale air and burnt coffee from breathing in and out through her mask. (Note to self: schedule teeth cleaning on a weekend that you are not on call!)
She got a page. Getting a page marked ‘urgent’ was not unusual because the St. Vincent de Paul Modesto Shelter had new admissions all the time for people experiencing homelessness who were positive for Covid-19 and need a safe place to recover. But the content of the page was unusual. A new mom and her two-week-old baby with Covid-19 were on their way to the shelter.