After many dark months of illness, isolation and death, hope arrived Monday morning at Ebenezer Ridges Care Center in Burnsville, Minn., in a blue igloo cooler.
Nurse Steve Rosenow was the first to sit down in the center’s chapel to get a dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as a line of his coworkers watched from the lobby. A nurse poked a needle into a vial of the vaccine just out of the cooler, and stuck it into Rosenow’s upper arm, as those around him cheered.
As Rosenow waited to make sure he didn’t have an allergic reaction to the first of two shots that should protect him against COVID-19, he reflected on the weight of the last nine months.