‘I figured things would change.’ SC seniors face isolation, even after COVID vaccine
On an iPad propped on his kitchen table, Ulrich Schafer looks at his wife, Nora. He asks her what they’ve brought her for lunch. He watches the daytime sitter adjust Nora’s wheelchair and pivot her iPad to stay in view.
Married for 54 years and once world travelers, Ulrich and Nora have seen each other mostly through a screen for the past year. Even now, after they’ve both received vaccinations against COVID-19, this is still as close as they get to one another most days.
The life-changing coronavirus vaccine, which they both jumped at the chance to receive, hasn’t changed everyday life much at all, not yet. For many seniors, like the Schafers, who’ve been prioritized in the line to receive the coveted vaccines, life remains in limbo.
The isolation, something the Schafers fear and loathe more than the coronavirus itself, persists. At this point, as far as they know, there’s no end in sight to living this way.
Ulrich, 79 — Uli to those who know him — lives alone in their tidy Lexington house, too big for just one man.
Nora, 84 — the woman who first asked Uli to dance five decades ago at a Sunday social club when they both lived in South Africa — lives alone in her room at the Wellmore skilled nursing facility in Lexington. Visitations remain severely restricted.
Their 50-year-old son, Michael, lives in a group home for disabled adults, in and out of a hospital recently as he struggles — without the help of his parents — with his own health issues. Nora desperately wishes to see him.
“If they don’t make it any better about keeping you away from your child, I wonder how many people will say, ‘Well, that was worth it,’” Nora wonders.
The cold of isolation has just begun to thaw at Wellmore since residents and many staff members received their vaccines in January, said Crystal Butcher, executive director of the facility. The residents recently have been able to interact more with one another in common areas. But residents are still largely cut off from loved ones on the outside, as Wellmore continues to abide by stringent recommendations from the CDC. Butcher hopes restrictions will be loosened soon as vaccinations become more widespread — but when?
Hope hovers closer on the horizon than it has for the past year, Butcher said, even if it is a somewhat tempered hope.
“Just being able to open back up and have a meal together and do social activities together. They’re just so happy to get back together and enjoy being in each other’s company. That’s made a big difference,” Butcher said. “Now, to see the residents excited and happy and enjoying things, I think that gives us some hope, and that’s positive for us.”
Coronavirus cases and deaths in nursing homes across the U.S. have decreased dramatically since the rollout of the vaccine, The New York Times reported in late February.
The Schafers didn’t consider for a moment not getting the shots; Nora’s was offered to her at Wellmore, and Ulrich scheduled his own at Lexington Medical Center. Nora Schafer thinks people who refuse the vaccine are “idiotic.”
“It might not be perfect,” she said of the vaccine, “but it’s something.”
Even though it’s their only tangible hope — the only hope for the country and the world, perhaps, to achieve herd immunity from the virus that’s killed more than half a million people in the United States alone — it’s not a silver bullet. It’s a hard-fought key to a victory that won’t be won for perhaps many more months.
“Yes, you know, we were hoping that with the vaccination really taking off that eventually the restrictions would ease. But I always thought that it would take a few weeks if not months,” Ulrich Schafer said. “To tell you the truth ... there has been no real change in our daily affairs. In other words, I still cannot see my wife, give her a hug and talk to her face-to-face. I tell you, on FaceTime, it’s not the same.”
The physical and mental tolls
Life did change for Louise Mayes not long after she received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
She was hospitalized — a fate many people, senior citizens especially, have feared as coronavirus infections turned hospitals into viral war zones.
The day after receiving her first vaccine dose in January, Mayes fell in her apartment, one of 38 units in a senior independent living complex in southeast Columbia. It took her 40 minutes to get to a phone to call a neighbor and then call 911, she said.
She needed surgery on her hip and wound up spending more than a week in the hospital.
“I just thank the Lord for getting that shot before I went in there,” said Mayes, who turns 84 this month. “Evidently, it had to be serious for them not to send me (home) and to keep me as long as they did. They’re not keeping people in the hospital like that right now.”
Vaccines now offer protection, in large part, from the physical danger of coronavirus, which brought peace of mind to Mayes in the hospital.
Yet, like many people in the population at large, many seniors have had uncertainty or hesitation about getting the vaccine, said Dr. Brandi Derrick, an internal medicine physician at Lexington Internists in Irmo. She’s tried to quell fears among her patients as much as possible by sharing evidence about the known safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
“We won’t have long-term data (on the vaccine) for a while, but we certainly know the alternative. If we were to get COVID, it could be detrimental,” Derrick said.
Besides the physical danger of COVID-19, the mental and emotional toll of the pandemic — of the isolation — might be immeasurable. Derrick said she’s seen a “big increase” in depression, especially among her older patients, largely an effect of loneliness and loss of regular activities.
Derrick, like her patients, is hopeful that won’t last for much longer.
“I did have a few (patients) that were very hopeful that once they got the vaccine they would be able to go back to normal life and be around their family again,” Derrick said. “I certainly did not want to stifle any hopefulness that they had, because after going through this for almost a year, I certainly wanted to encourage them.
“But I also wanted to be realistic. We’ve got to wait until the vaccine rolls out.”
Back home alone in her apartment, Mayes continues to work through her recovery with a physical therapist who comes by occasionally, and a social worker calls to check up on her.
“I’m trying to make it ‘round here. It’s kind of rough when you’re living by yourself,” she said.
Relief, hope and waiting
A neighbor stopped by Mayes’ apartment one recent afternoon to have her sign a birthday card for another neighbor, who was turning 80.
They used to have bimonthly birthday celebrations at the apartments, and bingo nights, and Bible studies. They don’t do those things anymore, but the neighbors still visit with one another, guarded by face masks that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
“They come with their masks on, and they ask me about anything I need help with. ... That’s a blessing,” Mayes said. “We realize what’s going on, so we have been being very cautious.”
Most of the residents in her apartment complex, she believes, opted to receive the vaccine when the first doses were offered in early January.
“I was very excited because, you know, we needed this here,” said Calvin Jenkins, a 66-year-old bricklayer who lives in the same apartment complex. “I asked more people to come and get their shots. … Too many people dying, and I know I needed it.”
One of the more active members of his community, Jenkins helps his neighbors out with household tasks, getting from one place to another and just keeping folks company. He does the same, when he can, for one of his brothers who lives nearby and has had several back operations. Now that Jenkins has gotten his vaccine, he says he’ll be seeing his brother more often.
Residents like Mayes and Jenkins, and Nora Schafer at Wellmore, benefited from a partnership between the federal government and chain pharmacies CVS and Walgreens to directly administer vaccines at long-term care facilities, at no cost to the residents and staff who choose to receive them.
That meant they avoided the obstacles many other senior citizens, who are eligible for the vaccine, have faced trying to access it. Across the nation and certainly in South Carolina, some older people have been thwarted by online registration processes, lack of adequate transportation and, in many cases, simple supply shortages, as millions of people clamor for still-limited quantities of the vaccines.
By the end of February, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control reported more than 929,000 vaccine doses had been administered in South Carolina. More than 34,100 long-term care facility residents and more than 20,200 staff members at those facilities have received at least one dose of the vaccine, health officials report.
“I definitely am very hopeful that over the next year things will continue to improve and seniors will certainly be safer, they’ll be more protected and able to get back to their normal lives and see their family and friends and resume their normal activities,” Derrick, the internal medicine doctor, said.
For now, there is at least a new measure of hope, and a measure of relief since the vaccine’s arrival.
“I feel a whole lot better and safer after I took that shot,” Jenkins said.
Peace of mind is still one of the biggest practical impacts of the vaccine, so far, in the lives of many like Jenkins.
“I figured things would change,” Jenkins said. “But it didn’t. It still stayed the same.”
“I’m just hoping this thing will go ahead and pass over with,” he added.
Now, to ‘stick around’
Ulrich Schafer speaks tenderly about his wife, who has dementia. He can’t care for her at home; she likely won’t be leaving Wellmore.
But he looks forward to taking her out, like he used to when she first moved in there in the fall of 2019, not long before the pandemic changed everything.
On a FaceTime video call that bled from morning to afternoon, Uli told Nora that one of these days he’d rent one of those wheelchair vans for her, and they’d go somewhere again.
“Well, put an order in soon,” Nora told him, and he chuckled.
They’ve just got to stick around a while longer, Uli assured her, let the vaccines take hold, then they can go out again.
“Well, it’s getting harder and harder,” Nora said.
“To stick around?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh Nora,” her husband said, “don’t be so negative.”
This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 12:52 PM.
