There is no escape as this virus has dominated everybody’s life this year. I will write my personal journey here. And if in the future I get to look at it again, it may be a reminder for if I fall into similar situations again.
I first heard of the virus on Wechat, a Chinese social app, when a group of people at Wuhan thought SARS came back. There was some news about possible new cases of SARS, but it soon got quiet and nobody was mentioning it. I never gave much thought about it since similar rumors are quite often on social platforms. This was around mid-December of 2019. About two weeks before the Chinese New Year 2020, a bunch of people in China got tested positive for some new disease that’s similar to SARS. And there were some cases of death. It seems that things were starting to get serious. Then just before the Chinese New Year celebration, the government started to be open about the disease, and the New Year celebration TV show was filled with the topic. It was around how medical personnel was pulled from other areas of China to support Wuhan. My parents in law told me about how their activities were being limited. My brother-in-law and his wife found some surgical mask for my parents-in-law and send it to them back in China. It’s all-around Chinese social media now. This was just the end of January 2020.
At the same time, Americans were not very worried. My coworkers were not talking about it as much. I tried to warn them, but I don’t think anybody was actually concerned. I had to take a company-wide meeting in the last week of January. I took some surgical masks with me on the flight but was too “scared” to use it because nobody else was using it. In the U.S. this is a sign that someone is really sick. I didn’t want to raise that flag, especially since I’m Asian looking. On the flight back, my transport from the airport to near my house was a bus ride. On the bus ride, there were two groups of Chinese travelers wearing masks. They mostly have surgical masks, and one guy even has an N-95 mask. Even the two children had masks on. I remember I was thinking that my son will never put a mask on. At that time, most people didn’t know that children under 12 are not heavily affected by the virus. I had some debate about whether I should have pulled the masks from my luggage, but it was under the bus already, and I didn’t want to ask the driver to get it for me. I intentionally shipped two rows of seats as I passed them. They weren’t coughing, so I wasn’t too worried. That may have not been a good thing, because we now know it can spread without symptoms, even if they had masks on.
After coming back from the business trip, there was no change in terms of public sentiment. There were no known cases in America except the Princess Diamond Cruise travelers. President Trump did close the border to China pretty early. But there was no mentioning of any country in Europe, and no known cases in Italy yet. I pretty much carried out the same at work. No masks or gloves. But every morning, I would ask Google Home to tell me about cases near my home. And see if there are cases. I checked the CDC website pretty regularly. The Sina Chinese site was keep tracking of cases by day. And there are more cases every day. No media other than CDC is covering this in America.
Right around the time my son had a break in February, there started to have cases around us because they went to Italy for vacation. There are more confirmed cases due to travel around my hometown. I was getting increasingly worried. We discussed as a family and thought about whether we should take my son out of school, even though he will be marked absent. We did not end up doing it. I just watched super closely. However, when California, Washington, and Massachusetts starting to have double triple-digit cases, I worked up the courage to ask my boss to let me work from home. My boss was of course super understanding about it. The funny thing was our CEO decided my whole company is going to work from home the next day. So all that was just for one day of working from home.
Once I started working from home, we were more worried about getting food and try to limit our trips to crowds. We started getting deliveries more and stocking up on rice, flours, and other non-perishable foods. Trips to grocery stores are getting more intense. We used masks and gloves even though no more than 10% of the public is doing that. My coworkers didn’t seem to be too worried about it. We were, of course, trying to get masks. But they would either be extremely expensive, like $20 each. Or simply not in stock for physical drug stores. All the big vendors were out. Since my wife is close to the healthcare system, she was still working. They are starting to lock PPE supplies at work. She had two 3 more weeks than me because she simply cannot work from home. When she no longer required to work, she was put on furlough. Unlike my company, her employer didn’t ever plan a similar situation, or have the funds to support her. She was told to apply for unemployment benefits.
Life post the big event is settling in place. We don’t go out. Try to get food delivered to us when we can. And only go out for groceries when it’s necessary. I can still work from home, so it’s somewhat regular. I have done online meetings before so I don’t think work is hugely affected. My son has to study and do homework for about 6 hours a day. All that time is managed by my wife, so she is getting stressed more than normal. We go out to run early in the morning to get some exercise. We live in a somewhat rural town, so it’s no difficult to avoid neighbors. We just say hi from far away. I don’t know when I will be going back to work physically as my son’s school is “home only” for the rest of the year. I don’t think we can manage my son’s school work with both my wife and I working the whole day without teachers. There are some talks already for people going back to work because some states have protested about it. And I think people area unrest because not everybody can make ends meet. A lot of people need to work to survive. And some people are willing to take the chance to fight for what they built with their whole life. They don’t want to see that go away because of the virus. For myself though, I think I will stay put for a while until there is a definite plan to return.