Pandemic Diaries 3
From Michigan:
I’m a recent college grad writing from a Michigan city with a major university and hospital system. The week after Spring Break the university closed and basically told everyone to go home. I wonder if students traveling helped spread cases. A dining hall worker just tested positive. My little sister’s school had spring break a week later and she begged our parents to take her home before people came back to campus.I wasn’t going to write, but then I looked at the local news this morning. In ten days the number of cases state-wide jumped from 2 to 549. A university email mentioned a “Regional Infectious Containment Unit” with 32 beds has been opened. Given that people from harder hit counties have been sent to our hospital I doubt that’ll be adequate. Two weeks ago a friend who’s a nurse was upset because people were stealing masks and hand-sanitizer from the same hospital. Yesterday a man shot his room-mate during an argument over coronavirus restrictions. Mine is a very safe city with little violent crime. I truly hope that’s an anomaly.One aspect that’s missing from the discussion on coronavirus’ economic impact is what the long term harm to Millennials (& maybe GenZ) will be. In the last decade many millennials had to live with parents, not buy cars, take low paid jobs, delay starting families, etc. because of the ’08 recession. What will another economic disaster do to them now that they are in their 30s? What will the long term political impact be when a whole generation is financially much worse off than their parents? Most of the liberals under 40 that I know are staunch Sanders supporters for economic reasons. Fortunately I just got a job but the start date is tentative due to coronavirus. After the recent drop in the stock market buying a car is a bit more tenuous so I might need a loan. A friend who was about to graduate is now considering a delivery job (he was going to be a teacher). A friend who didn’t go to college can’t work because she’s a hairdresser and is impacted by restrictions.My Lutheran church has stepped up to help congregants which is encouraging. College students are babysitting for parents now that schools have closed and local families have offered to house college students who need somewhere to stay. Doing church and bible study virtually has worked so far but a friends baptism has been postponed and communion is sorely missed. My adult confirmation class will now be conducted online.
I thought I’d write in, though I doubt if I have much of great interest to add to the discussion.
The development of the COVID19 pandemic in New Orleans was swift. On March 10, I sent a text to an old friend in Ohio joking that there were 3 cases of coronavirus in LA: it was time to break out the respirators and Purell. Less than a week later, all bars and restaurants were ordered closed and the number of positive cases had climbed exponentially.
I am (was?) a full-time guitarist in the area. My buddies and I put on our first show as a new band last Friday in BR; we played to a good crowd of people, with many daps and hugs exchanged among us. And last Saturday, Bourbon Street was packed out, as were other parts of town where St. Patrick’s Day parades and events, despite being officially cancelled, drew large crowds of revelers anyway. Perhaps there is something to be said of this Dionysian spirit which is so thoroughly imbues southeastern Louisiana; the same spirit that invented jazz and tolerates drinking in public (encourages it, rather) and second-lines in commemoration of the deceased is hard to squelch whether its a hurricane or viral pandemic. And if the current lockdown remains through the summer and fall months, I will be all the more grateful for these final moments of beauty and camaraderie before the pandemic hit.
As far as I can tell, no one has any good idea how long this lockdown will last. I am highly doubtful that April 13th – the date officially set by the state government as of now – will roll around and suddenly all the venues, bars and live music will immediately re-open and life will spring back to normal. After four weeks of being closed, how many venues and restaurants and bars will even be able to reopen? Even if the Feds send out some checks, it’s not clear to me the businesses will survive or that the service workers staffing them will remain in the area. And this is assuming the lockdown measures only last four weeks. If these measures continue into May, June, July…. I can scarcely imagine how derelict even Bourbon and Frenchman streets may look despite the lockdown being lifted.
I myself have considered relocating to Charlotte, NC where my mother lives for the duration of the lockdown. My uncle is a carpenter there, still has work and could hire me on. But this could be reckless of me; as a service industry worker myself, in an area where community spread is all but certain, I may be carrying the virus without knowing it. I could unwittingly infect my mother and uncle and others. I would love to be tested, but testing facilities are only testing people who are first-responders or otherwise exhibit the 3 major symptoms of COVID19: fever, coughing, and body aches.
Each day I grow more persuaded that this pandemic will fundamentally alter our society. At the local level, if the bars and venues that hosted so many great musicians close, we will have lost one of the final bastions of live music in this country; we will have lost perhaps the last city where making a living solely from playing music was possible, not to mention the loss of the cultural uniqueness so much of New Orleans’ music possesses. Could it be rebuilt? Might it relocate? Perhaps. But at the national level, I wonder if this pandemic will merely accelerate the trend towards a very-online, digital existence. If movie theatres close, will anyone notice? Netflix and Disney+ streams are readily available. If venues for live music close, YouTube concerts and Instagram live-streams may supplant them, or else Spotify will simply become more ubiquitous than it is now. Will businesses, operating without hindrance as employees work from home, keep renting their expensive downtown office spaces? Will college life and its incumbent expenses remain justifiable to parents after their child completes much of their coursework online at home?
A week ago, I very much took for granted the world I was in. Now, I wonder if that world will ever be recovered, or how much of it may even be recovered.
It may be a while until we find out. In the interim, there is ample time for reading, listening to records and watching movies – of course, in gatherings of less than 10 people.
From Puget Sound, Washington:
Random thoughts from Kingston, a small town on Puget Sound:
– Working remotely has its pluses, but there is a disconnection from my work and coworkers that I do find unsettling and using Zoom for virtual meetings doesn’t cut it.
– Bandwidth at home sucks.– On the other hand, at least we “do” have Internet– I’m feeling fortunate to “not” be working in one of the hard hit sectors: airlines, travel, restaurants, small businesses, etc. Poor folks. Left an extra large tip when we did take out earlier in the week.– Where’s the random testing data? Come on! Without it, it’s hard to have a context for rate of infection and death rates.– I went in to work Monday. Ferry workers told everyone who drove onto the ferry to stay in their cars. So I did.– Just heard that our offices are going to be closed for another 6 weeks. We’re located 5 miles from the epicenter, the nursing home in Kirkland where there was a cluster of deaths, so plenty of fear and loathing in the air.– Called my siblings yesterday. They’re scattered around the country. Can’t remember the last time I did that on the same day. Goodness from the coronavirus?– There were 4 people at work on Monday. It was kind of spooky.– Seattle’s rush hour traffic always sucks. But the freeways are now essentially deserted. My typical 1 hr 20 minute commute on Monday was just a few minutes over 1 hr, including the 25 minutes on the ferry.– Everything is shut down: libraries, parks, playgrounds, and even the casinos. Casinos? Crap, maybe this really is serious.– Dropped off my car for repairs. Signs posted on the front door said to use the night drop and it felt a bit like I was making a drug deal.– Has the Rapture happened? I imagine this is what it would feel like if all those 70s Evangelicals were right about all Christians disappearing from earth in a twinkling of an eye. As my brother said, “so I guess this would mean we’ve been left behind!”– It absolutely sucks that my son-in-law’s return is on hold/up in the air. He’s spent the last year in Bahrain courtesy of the U.S. Navy. He was about to rotate home and be reunited with his family, my daughter and their two kids, ages 2 and 5, and now this hits. Not a death, sickness, job loss or other such tragedies, but a tragic in another way. My wife and I have had them living with us for the past year – we didn’t want them alone while Andrew was gone – and it has been a special time that I will always cherish, but the kids are ready to have daddy home, and my daughter is ready to be reunited with her husband. If Andrew can get back to the US, and if the Navy will let him travel, doesn’t matter where it is, I’m going to saddle up my trusty Subaru and go get him. Stay tuned.– I just hate the hysterical headlines the media’s using to entice clicks/viewers. They always seem to scream the worst case scenario. Without better data, count me skeptical the worst is gonna happen.– So, I’m still participating in and training for what’s called the Seventy48, a 70 mile human powered raced on Puget Sound between Tacoma and Port Townsend that’s happening in early June. I just received a terrific email from the RaceBoss that it’s still on. Great! Here’s hoping they don’t cancel it. I am certainly practicing appropriate social distancing from the seals when I’m out rowing. This is the kind of event that I think people are going to need. A laugh in the face of fear and despair, and a celebration of being alive.– Kudos to all those delivery folks out there!– My 85-year-old mom and 90-year-old father-in-law are doing fine, though my father-in-law makes frequent comments about wanting to die, so I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’s snuck out of his apartment in search for someone who’s sick. Their facilities are locked down, no going out, no visitors, but so far so good.– Across the state, all schools are shut down. My grandson is happy to be done with kindergarten. Because I’m home, too, I took a break from my computer and he and I went on a hike through the woods yesterday. More coronavirus goodness. Soon enough he and his sister, my daughter and son-in-law will be off to Japan for three years, and I am going to miss them terribly. Yeah, we’ll go visit, but not the same as having them easy to hug.
– The weather has been cold but quite lovely the past week or so. Cherry trees are beginning to explode with popcorn blossom, daffodils are up. Once the night time temperatures quit the 30s, I think everything is going to shake off winter and wake up. I’m hoping warmer temps and the UV rays of spring send the coronavirus back into its hellhole.
American living in Porto, Portugal. Married to a Portuguese lady with two grown children. English teacher.
We’re under a State of Emergency declared a couple of days ago. People have been self-quarantining for about a week now. All bars and restaurants are closed. Schools and universities have been closed for a week. One thousand twenty cases and six dead. Porto has instituted drive-in testing with a current capacity of 400 per day, but this will be expanded to 700. A good health care infrastructure is available in most places in this country . . . thanks to socialized medicine.
A couple of hot spots: in the North of the country and Lisbon. The first cases were a group who had visited a trade fair in Milan Italy supposedly.
Last week we all went out on our balconies and clapped our hands in support of the health care professionals who provide this thin red line between the people and this calamity. A lot of people fear the economic consequences of all this. Talk of this lasting till the end of the year, but no one knows how the situation will look at the end of it. There is a sense of the unknown and a certain uneasiness, but no panic. Portuguese are by nature a bit fatalistic so maybe in this situation that tendency helps to keep people calm.
A quick window visit with the grandkids in W. PA. Broke my heart.
As my “weekend” ends, I’ll be returning to work tomorrow as a correctional officer at the county jail. Definitely NOT looking forward to it (not the most positive or cleanest environment under normal circumstances!) but you do what you have to do. I’m fortunate to still be employed.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina; we’re young, we’re Catholic, and we’re stable even amid much change. The virus has changed our lives dramatically, and we’re doing our best to take the good with the bad. Our faith is seeing us through, even as the waters rise.From the outset, we’ve been paying close attention–thanks in large part to your early reporting and Wyoming Doc– so we’re pretty well-stocked on essentials, and didn’t have to wade into the insanity that was last week. But we’re also especially nervous; my wife is in her first trimester (first pregnancy). There’s absolutely no information about how corona affects pregnant women or the unborn, save for some small-sample-size studies on third-trimester women in China.We know even a fever could lead to serious complications, so it doesn’t matter one iota to us whether this thing is worse or comparable to the flu (hint: it’s worse)… We’re still frightened. If this is thing is like other major coronaviruses (SARS or MERS), it will have catastrophic effects on kids in utero. We could bear (literally and figuratively) a handicapped child—it will be ours to love. But I don’t know if we could bear losing the child in the midst of this. God give us strength.Which reminds me, we’ve been praying a lot. My wife and I are both in Bible studies with our friends, both of which have transitioned to video-call Rosary groups. Once a week I pray with my “bros”, she with her girlfriends.Everything feels so surreal. My family–scattered across the northeast–is fraught with worry. I would say they’re frantic, but that would make it seem like I’m not also fraught with worry and frantic. I’m trying to keep my cool. My in-laws are another story; they are the business-as-usual Boomers you’ve heard about in this crisis. Going to the mall because they “need” to return some clothes. Saying “there are only a few cases in the county,” while a week ago it was “few cases in the state,” days before that “the country.” … They’re as immune to familial advice as they think they are to this virus.As for work, we’re both working from home, and very grateful to have jobs that can be done remotely. My wife (a teacher) has been in a very bad job for a while, toxic environment, so the working from home is actually a major reprieve. Despite everything, her emotional and psychological health is better now than it was two weeks ago. If the fact that a global pandemic induces less anxiety than her normal day-to-day doesn’t prove that teachers are underpaid, I don’t know what does.As for my job, I work for a small, family-run company that relies on seasonal revenue. If Christmas-shopping season is our bread, springtime is our butter. That season just disappeared. Yesterday they let go two dozen employees, about 30% of the company. It’s entirely about survival. In the midst of this, the entire leadership team has taken big pay cuts. and pay cuts are likely for the rest of us in the coming weeks / months.But God has seen us through it all so far. Six months ago I had a choice at my job, to move upwards onto a new team, or move “laterally” into another. I chose the “lateral” option because I felt God was calling me to that work rather than “upward” for the sake of my career and paycheck. It’s because of that choice that I didn’t get sacked yesterday. The team that I didn’t join was almost entirely let go, while my team now remains untouched and is the company’s hope for the future.Furthermore, my wife and I bought a house in January. Our original plan was to look in the spring and buy in the early summer, but then–by grace– the perfect house came on the market and we got it. That search and the move would be impossible now, especially with the pregnancy. We’d be stuck in a tiny apartment where it was hard to get distance from neighbors. We’re glad to have space at home, and a nice neighborhood where we can go for walks while maintaining social distance from others.And the house is a blessing not just for our sake. Our friend, a Catholic seminarian, just had his seminary close down. He was sent home, but his family isn’t in this diocese and they’re high risk for the disease. But without a seminary, and without a job, he’s on his own. We’ve offered to take him in since we have room, but we’ll see. He may try to stay with on of the diocesan priests so he can stay near the sacraments.Our diocese suspended public Masses last week, which was a major blow to all of us. First Sunday that my wife and I have ever missed Mass. We’re lucky (blessed) though: we have an “in” with a priest who is allowing us to attend a Mass tomorrow evening (after getting explicit permission from his bishop), but it’s strictly capped at 8 people, and we have to keep it’s time and location to ourselves.We see so much Providence in all of this; we have the house, my job is safe– for now–and my wife gets an unexpected reprieve from work just as she was starting to break down. But the anxiety remains; we still need to protect our unborn child; I could lose my job and we could end up under water on this new mortgage. The worst is just not knowing.God will provide. He always has.
I have a little different take on this, one that hasn’t been mentioned in the news at all that I have seen – that of the plight of those who have mental illnesses. I have type 2 bipolar disorder, and for those who are not familiar with it, it manifests as severe and chronic depression on one side, and shorter hypomanic episodes which can be feelings of euphoria, high energy, rash behavior, irritability, and so on. It is a different illness from type 1 bipolar disorder (which most people are more familiar with), but no less serious or crippling to a person’s life.While I have a pretty decent and somewhat secure job, many people with bipolar disorder, or other serious mental illnesses, work short term jobs in the service industry or retail positions, etc. This is because it can be sometimes difficult to keep a job between medication changes, incidents at work, bias against people with mental illness, and so on. So, these folks are now going to be out of a job, isolated, potentially without medication, family support, etc. This virus is going to be nothing short of disastrous for people who are already struggling to be functional when times are normal. Now? I don’t want to even think about it.Myself, I’m worried about whether or not I will be able to keep getting medication, as I need it to keep my mood shifts and intensity under control. I worry if I’ll be able to get in to see my therapist, which is essential for managing the non-medical side of the illness. I worry about the stress from the pandemic aggravating my illness, as it can trigger a hypomanic episode. I worry about slipping back into depression as the bad news and disruptions to life seem to keep coming. I worry about the impact of my illness on my family, as they are also cooped up with me at a stressful time. Also, I have a co-morbid health issue which puts me at higher risk if I do contract this thing.Outside of all this, ennui seems to be setting in for us and our neighbors. There is talk of shortages of toilet paper, things that are closed now, how we’re keeping busy, and so on. The flood of sickness hasn’t reached our area yet, even though there are confirmed cases locally, so the sense of danger is still remote. Going to a store means keeping six feet away from everyone, and gawking at the empty shelves for things like pasta and Chef Boyardee ravioli. Meat is often sold out. It feels like being in a nation at war, yet the frontlines are still very far away. I think at some point, we’re all going to wind up being “institutionalized,” where going somewhere feels alien and uncomfortable, after years of mobility and shopping as a pastime.Or, maybe it is just learning to readjust to old realities. Contrasting my wife’s childhood with mine, her family often went places, on vacations, were social. My family, with alcohol abuse and mental illness, seldom went anywhere because there was neither the inclination or the money. Before adulthood, I had been on one short road trip one state away, and had never set foot in an amusement park, for example. Now, this is everyone’s reality. I won’t go into the platitudes that some are likely spouting of “Maybe some family time will be good.” The problem with that is the culture of family has been so badly broken over the last couple of generations that to rediscover it will be impossible for many. They will be like strangers to each other, still, but just living trapped under the same roof.I don’t see things ever being the same after this. Our debt-based financial system is going to be completely upended, and the changes to our culture will be deep and permanent. Hope you are staying healthy, and I hope everyone remembers that it’s better to stay six feet apart than be six feet under.
As my wife and I celebrate Day 7 of our quarantine I thought I would share how our week has gone. I am back in school for a second degree at UNO and the school has moved entirely to online classes for the rest of the semester. No one is quite sure how it will work but everyone is working thru it. My wife is a school teacher in Jefferson Parish and they have shut down the school system, no one including the superintendent seems to have any idea what they are going to do. But she is keeping in contact with the kids and doing what she can to keep some level of education going.
So far eight of our immediate friends are suspected to have C-19 though none of them have been able to get tested yet. Luckily they are all young and healthy, and are all healing up reasonably well. All of them had roommates or guests over Mardi Gras that have since been confirmed, but none of them qualify for testing because their symptoms are mild enough there is no therapeutic justification for the test.
As a family (my entire extended family) have set up a weekly grocery run, where one of us goes shopping for the entire group. I broke quarantine on Tuesday to go shopping for seven households, and had the largest Costco bill I have ever seen at close to $2,000. But none of the over 65 group have left their house so that’s a positive.
Sadly one close friend passed away from C-19. He was seriously ill before hand, and wasn’t expected to last much longer. But speaking to his widow about how much it broker her heart not to be by his side when he passed (because of the quarantine) was heart breaking.
With about a week to go until my sister is no longer communicable (she is suspected thanks to her live in nanny that is positive), I expect to hand over grocery shopping duties to her, since she won’t be at risk. So I will be making another grocery run this weekend. Her wife is a vet tech, and returning to normal from her fever. She has already reached out to a hospital to work since she can work around sick people without worry of reinfection (how insane is it that they are so desperate for people that someone without a license is in such high demand).
My wife and I are in multiple group text threads so some level of interpersonal contact is continuing. But life is far from normal and with no end in sight this may continue for a very long time. I keep thinking of it like a missed spring, the birds are out, everything looks normal, but we are all functional shut ins until….
Writing to you from Colorado. It feels like we are on the brink of this getting pretty ugly around here. Yesterday there was an article on 9news.com from the CEO of a hospital up in Vail that basically said he believes the virus is widespread in that particular mountain region, and their hospital is going to be quickly overwhelmed in the next week or two. The current numbers for that county are 51 positive cases, the most in Colorado, but this CEO said there are likely 1000s. My boomer parents are in a town near to this county, and my step-dad continues to go out and work. My friends from back home are saying that most people have been going about life like nothing is happening, meanwhile the two counties they share major highways with have had confimred community spread for over a week. I’m certainly worried, and my parents have heard it from me already.I live on the Front Range near Denver. We only have 11 confirmed cases so far, and its obvious that people aren’t worried as parks have been packed with kids and their on-looking parents. Meanwhile, I know two families and an individual who probably have COVID-19, but have been refused testing. One family has a 5 year old who has an upper respiratory issue and tested negative for flu, but the pediatrician said Colorado isn’t testing anyone under the age of 16. I haven’t confirmed this elsewhere, but this whole family is now sick and they wont test any of them. My other friend who is sick recently recovered from Colon Cancer. She has been coughing so much that her throat is bleeding. Meanwhile, all of the stores are out of cough drops. She also has not been tested. Senator Cory Gardner held a live phone call with the President of UC Health today and the biggest takeaway for me was the we basically have no tests available in Colorado at this time. If you go to the ER and you don’t have severe breathing problems, you will be turned away with no test. So we basically have no way to stop the spread without broad, enforced, social distancing. I think this is the case nation wide, but the testing failure seems particularly bad here. And of course, shutting down schools, bars and restaurants has not stopped a lot of people from continuing to be out and about.I’m a real estate agent, so I am anticipating that I will have no income in the near future. The market is still really busy here, even with many of us taking a lot of precautions, like no more open houses and showings recorded with a video camera. I have some clients who are purchasing a home here and trying to sell their home in Sacramento. California just went on a state wide shelter at home tonight, so we will see how that impacts their ability to get that home sold. What happens there will be a good indicator of what to expect in the coming weeks. A lot of people are asking what is happening in the real estate market, and I don’t know what to tell them. This situation is unprecedented. I have no idea what to tell anyone. I probably wouldn’t buy a home right now.
My brother is an endocrinologist, working at a hospital in central Spain, about 20 min away from my parents’. He lives with them and spent all the time he is not at hospital working for our parish. He is the calmest and most hopeful person I’ve ever met, and from whom I got the foundation of my faith.Until yesterday, he was treating patients from their offices, with no direct contact, but today he started working double shifts, visiting them in their rooms. He may be the last person they see, his the last hand they touch, and I’m sure that they pray for them and would also with them if they could breathe.I woke up this morning to a video my brother had sent me. In it, a friend of ours, a nurse and now fresh out of med school too, cries in front of the camera explaining how serious this is. She is working at the same hospital as my brother. This is happening one hour and a half away from Madrid, in Alcazar de San Juan. I can’t even imagine how they are in the capital.He says hospital is like a war room, and that he can’t help crying. What’s worse for him is seeing abuelitos [grandparents] gaping, unable to breathe, in empty rooms, far from their loved ones. “And I can do nothing else but comfort them in their agony.”When I asked him about his protection, he said that they do have, but they have to reutilize their mask for two days, and that they cover the good one with a regular one.
He is just praying they set up an emergency hospital soon, but I don’t see that happening because no one has ever cared about our area, La Mancha, one of the poorest in an already depressed country.Meanwhile, here in New York, my roommate just came home drunk. He got a job last Monday, and this is his way to “celebrate” before the curfew that starts this Sunday. A big gathering with his buddies.
I’ve seen your posts on unseriously people are taking this virus in the US, and I wanted to provide a different prospective from Seattle. Everything has been deserted here for weeks at this point, for example every sit down restaurant I’ve passed has been empty since the 7th and this was well before any official orders to shut down (https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/seattle-chef- tom-douglas-is-closing-his- restaurants-temporarily-due- to-the-new-coronavirus/). Also just anecdotally everyone I know has been minimizing the time out of the house. I have no clue why people out here seem to have taken it more seriously quickly, but one thought I have had is that it helps that so much of the workforce out here works for large tech firms. At Amazon we have been mandatory work-from home since the 5th, and its been similar for Microsoft and all the others. This has both reduced the number of people out there, but also seems to have driven home to everyone how serious this is. Its also been good to see the Governor being more proactive then a lot of other states in closing down large gathers, schools ect.In terms of day to day not to much has changed beyond having to use use videochat, and phones for everything. I’m sort of lucky in that I am already a transplant so most of the way I talk to friends and family is over a digital connection anyway. So apart from my dining options being restricted I can’t really complain, I’m healthy & employed.
