LOS ANGELES — A year ago this month, during the early days of the pandemic, Susan Hernandez, a cashier at Food 4 Less in North Hollywood, found herself in a
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A year ago this month, during the early days of the pandemic, Susan Hernandez, a cashier at Food 4 Less in North Hollywood, found herself in a sea of panic-buying shoppers.
The coronavirus hadn’t claimed any lives yet in Southern California, but the scenes in stores gave a certain dawn-of-the-apocalypse movie, everyone-out-for-themselves vibe.
“People were fighting over water,” Hernandez recalled. “Our managers had to break up fights.”
Eventually, a sense of relative calm descended as the direst projections didn’t seem to come to pass. Then came the fall surge, when Los Angeles County became the latest American epicenter of the pandemic. Working in a supermarket once again became a crucible of stress, but not because of panicked shoppers. Now, it was the sheer amount of infection everywhere.
. As a warehouse manager at a Food 4 Less in Los Angeles, Norma Leiva greets delivery drivers hauling in soda and chips and oversees staff stocking shelves and helping customers. At night, she returns to the home she shares with her elderly mother-in-law, praying the coronavirus isn t traveling inside her. A medical miracle at the end of last year seemed to answer her prayers: Leiva, 51, thought she was near the front of the line to receive a vaccine, right after medical workers and people in nursing homes. Now that California has expanded eligibility to millions of older residents in a bid to accelerate the administration of the vaccines she is mystified about when it will be her turn.