Life in Quarantine

2020 has been a year unlike any other, and we will certainly remember this time for decades to come. This post is about the coronavirus from my perspective.

In January I remember hearing news reports about Wuhan, China and how there was some sort of virus. It was a story on CNN for a few days, but there were a lot of things happening, with the Democratic primaries coming up, Australia had severe fires, and the U.S. assassinated the Iranian General, so I didn't pay much attention to Wuhan. I remember seeing a few people talk about Covid on instagram, but again didn't really register, and I (like many people) had no idea what Covid was. I still traveled to San Francisco in January, and it was totally normal.

Then all of a sudden in mid March, every news story was talking about this virus non-stop. It was front page all day and all night. Italy had tens of thousands of deaths, and Spain got hit bad too, which made it feel more connected, because Europe is much more culturally aligned to the U.S. than China. If it hit Europe, it's probably coming to the U.S. There were stories of a couple cases here and there in Seattle. Then by early April hundred, and then thousands of people had it in NYC, and by May tens of thousands of Americans were dying. People rushed to stock up on supplies, the line at Costco was hundreds deep just to get in the store. There were no toilet paper or paper towels available, as shoppers purchased 3x what they normally would and stores sold out. Neighbors were sharing what they could

The way to stop the virus spreading was shelter in place and wearing masks everywhere. This meant states were basically shutting down. Essential workers only were allowed to leave the house, everyone else was working from home. Airlines, hotels, and restaurants went from full capacity to zero overnight. My business went from record revenues and profits to 30% of that number. I had a couple of skype calls with our team, distributed across the North and South America, and it was rough. I personally took a big hit, and did my best to keep the team working on projects, even if at a reduced hours or pay. All of a sudden there were 20 million people unemployed in the U.S., when before the record jobless claim was about 800k in a week, there were weeks of millions filing unemployment.

It was hard to be that frustrated about the economy because people were getting sick and dying, and in large numbers. We just tried to make the best of it. We worked from home and in the evenings we were able to go out on the golf course (which was closed) and let Bali run around. He loved it. Time with friends changed immediately, everyone kept a 6 foot distance. We ate takeout, but rarely went inside restaurants. Instead of going to the grocery store, we've used instacart. I haven't even thought about flying anywhere, and we celebrated Christie and Zach's birthday much different this year. It was sad my parents couldn't come out, but it's the new normal.

From March through the time of this post (Sept 4th), it's been an up and down roller coaster of shutdowns, back to normal, kind of normal, shutdown again, full shelter in place, and back again. We're not really sure what the new normal is. People are losing businesses and homes because they can't work, and when there are birthday parties or get togethers and people come in contact, some have zero symptoms, while others go into comas on ventilators and many don't recover.