It was the climax of COVID pandemic in early 2021 but the light was in the tunnel. The two vaccines moderna and pfizer were already in the market and the challenge across the world is how to administer and manage the supply chain of these vaccines beside the manufacturing and production challenges. Astrazeneca was added later in the list but the US decided to give those vaccines to the neighboring countries Canada and Mexico. In the city of San Diego, UC San Diego Health was leading the effort of vaccination in the San Diego Area with multiple major sites and a super station at Petco park. More importantly, it was one of the biggest vaccination sites in the world with 120 people being administered vaccines parallely at any time inside the patient car. Where in the world can this happen ? It's only in the United States of America.
I remember doing full time volunteering for a day in the year 2014 to train grade eight students on economics at Allen Village School on November 05 at Kansas City.It was quite an experience, to manage students of middle school , without the class teacher the day would have been terrible. However it was a great memorable experience. I ended up learning economics101 from volunteering and understood how the school system works in the US. Even if you learn simple things in volunteering, that will make my day.
It was more than six years I did volunteering and I was really excited for this COVID volunteering because it was historical in nature both locally and globally. The good news was I was already vaccinated and my manager was really motivating us to do the volunteering. I quickly applied online for the scriber position and was approved in the next couple of days. They do a strong background check before allowing any volunteers in the site. Glad I learned an Epic, an electronic medical record (EMR) system in a few clicks, only the vaccination administration module.
As I arrived at 8:00 am in the morning of friday, 12th of february. It was super easy to park as they have top floors of MTS buildings for the parking. I went to the registration team and they assigned me to one of the lots - D4.
As I was a scriber, I had the opportunity to engage with patients and ask for their identity card and enter their personal information into the medical record system with vaccines lot number and a patient personal information. Every patient I worked with was very excited to give their identity card and receive their vaccination card back from me when they had a vaccine. That piece of information was like a treasure, the way people were putting the vaccination cards inside their purse.I saw a whole lot of different identity cards from passports to driving licenses to other state cards and a veteran card. People were inherently calm but excited and scared from inside.
As the people pulled up their car inside the tents to line up for the vaccination, I can see people are excited with full of hopes in their eyes. I feel like the work I did was self-fulfilling, helping people to fight with the COVID pandemic. It was a constant flow of people with hopes and excitement.I didn't realize that it was already lunch time. They provided a turkey sandwich which was really good and I appreciate the sponsor who sponsored that food for us.
The other half day was a very busy day too. I didn’t realize it was 6:30 and It's time to leave. Still there were lines and people were coming. I thanked everyone and was also thankful to me and headed towards the parking lot. I have never worked like that, standing for ten hours. I feel so good. I specially saluted healthcare workers who were working round the clock for the vaccination putting their and families life at risk.
When driving home back, I thought when in life time you will get this opportunity to heal so many people at a time as a computer engineer? This was definitely a moment, I will never forget this in my life.
