Last year was a lonely Christmas for Michi Chang and her family. The coronavirus kept them from celebrating the holiday with family and friends.

But the COVID-19 vaccines brought some sense of normalcy into their lives this year. They celebrated Christmas with family and friends and drove from their Walnut home to Wrightwood so that her two girls, ages 11 and 5, could go tubing.

“We’ve been stuck at home for too long because of COVID,” she said. “We’re working from home, they’ve been studying from home, everything has been from home, so we wanted to come out and spend time with friends.”

But none of that meant Chang wasn’t thinking about the highly contagious Omicron variant that has been spreading across the state.