South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
She got a shot. He didn’t. Now what?
Partially vaccinated groups navigate risks, freedom
NEW YORK — Burly and well over 6 feet tall, Andre Duncan takes pride in carrying the groceries for his wife, Michelle, and views himself as her personal bodyguard.
Now, she is his: Ever since she got the coronavirus vaccine in February, Michelle Duncan, who works in hospital management, has insisted she run their errands alone. When she goes shopping, Andre Duncan, who is unvaccinated, stays home.
Andre Duncan, 44, said he feels gratitude but also guilt, and that tension has altered the dynamic of their marriage. “She has to take risks and chances on her own, when that’s my partner, that’s my honey.”
As of this week, more than
145 million shots have gone into arms since the vaccine began rolling out in the United States in December. But amid supply chain snarls and inconsistent state-bystate eligibility rules, just
16% of Americans are fully vaccinated. As a result, an untold number of households now find themselves divided, with one partner, spouse, parent or adult child vaccinated and others waiting, sometimes impatiently, for their number to come up.
Now, after a year spent navigating job losses and lockdowns, sickness and fear, some families are experiencing the long-awaited arrival of vaccines not with elation or relief, but a fraught combination of confusion, jealousy or guilt.
“In that moment that I got the vaccine, instead of, ‘I should be so super-happy, I survived this nonsense,’ instead of all that I felt the biggest guilt of my life,” said Lolo Saney, 65, an elementary schoolteacher who lives
in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Her mother, who lives abroad, is still waiting.
In New York, people who hold certain jobs and have certain conditions are eligible. And while people age 30 and older were made eligible this week, it will be weeks or even months before any number of partners or spouses of nurses or teachers, or those straddling previous age thresholds, are able to secure coveted vaccine appointments.
Some of the newly vaccinated are finding that the tentative return to normalcy is at least partly on hold as they navigate uncharted new worries: how to coexist with and care for relatives, roommates and partners who are not yet vaccinated.
Although the Biden administration directed states to open up vaccine
eligibility to all adults by May 1, at the current pace, the entire population might not be vaccinated until August — and that assumes all pledges of supply are met, and children eventually qualify for vaccines, according to a New York Times analysis.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that even if every adult in a home gets vaccinated, any young children will likely not be for some time; while in New York, people 16 and older will become eligible on April 6, vaccine trials for young children have only just begun.
Until then, some who were the first in their families to be vaccinated are finding that the shots come freighted with new responsibilities: shopping for groceries, going to the laundromat, visiting the sick.
Just-released data show the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines provide strong protection against infections, easing fears that vaccinated people could pass on the virus to others. But the data are new, and the vaccinated have spent months wondering whether their newfound freedoms, like trips to the movie theater or dinner with friends, could bring the virus home to loved ones.
“These are all layers that just weigh heavy on everybody, and can sometimes cause more anxiety and tension and depression,” said George James, a therapist with the Council for Relationships, a Philadelphia-based mental health center that focuses on couples and families. But one possible plus of the past tumultuous year, he said,
was that families may now be better equipped to navigate this new twist.
“That doesn’t mean that families aren’t in crisis or overwhelmed or at their breaking point,” James said. “But if I was to look at it as a whole, I think there has been more strength and resiliency and ability to say, ‘OK, we figured this out, we can figure this next thing out.’ ”
Ashraya Gupta, 34, was vaccinated because she teaches high school science, and teachers were made eligible for the vaccine in January. She now has the pleasure of planning vacations, weekends away with friends and movie theater outings. But life for her as-yet-unvaccinated partner, Colin Kinniburgh, 30 — a freelance journalist, with whom she lives in Brooklyn
— is largely unchanged from the year of lockdown.
Recently, Gupta spent a weekend away with a friend, a schoolteacher who was also vaccinated. It was the first time she had seen that friend in over a year, she said — and one of the few times she and Kinniburgh have been apart since the outbreak began. The weekend was restorative, she said, for both of them.
For others, like Andre Duncan in Harlem, the situation has created a strain. He feels that he is failing in his duty as a husband, he said, when his wife asks him not to join her on the grocery run. “She believes she is protecting me, and it is the right thing to do, and I feel like I don’t want her to,” he said.
He added: “It takes a lot from the relationship.”