Life in the Time of COVID-19

I give credit -- or apologies -- for the title of this post and its followers on this topic to Gabriel García Marquez.

On my mother's side, there is a collateral relative who lived at the time of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.  She lost her children to the disease, getting no help from her husband.  She divorced him and went from Indiana to California to start anew, met a doctor and married him.

What will our lives be like as we go through this pandemic, and hopefully, live to see the end of it?  What family stories will come out of this pandemic?

I am going to post about what it is like living through this thing, so that future generations of genealogists and family historians will have some record of what it was like.  I don't limit this to my own family, because, for one thing, the family patrimony for future generations is solely in the hands and life of our grandson.  For another, any record of what it was like can be used for background for just about anyone's family history.

So here's what it is like.

The outbreak of this virus was just declared a pandemic about a week ago.  The entire world is affected.  Closer to home, there has been one death so far in my county, at a hospital four miles from our home.  How much more exposure there may be, no one knows.

In my state, there have been 314 cases reported so far, with 7 deaths.  For some reason, children seem not to be infected at the same rate as adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and seem to have milder cases when they do fall ill with it.

My husband and I are 73 and 72, respectively.  He is actually pretty healthy, but I have a bunch of chronic conditions.  The recommendation for folks our age is to stay home.  My husband and I, natural homebodies, do that pretty much, anyway.  We have been in the habit of going out to eat something like once a week, but we're not doing that any more for a while.  My husband went to the grocery store yesterday to stock up, so we have plenty of meats, frozen vegetables, fruit, and other grocery supplies.

He said that people were crazy.  He also went to BJs wholesale club yesterday, and said that the toilet paper was gone, and the shelves where it had been were stocked with bottled water.  You'd think a category five hurricane was coming, not a possible 14-days at home to avoid exposure.

The economic impact of this pandemic could be disastrous.  Restaurants are being ordered to close.  Universities, colleges, and public schools are shutting down.  Our grandson has an extra two weeks off right now, in addition to his school's spring break.  He's a fifteen-year-old freshman in high school.  Our older daughter, enrolled in the doctoral program in audiology at the University of Florida, is attending her classes online rather than in person.  The university is even making some plans to put all their clinical rotations online rather than in person, too.  As a forner registered nurse, I'm not sure how well that could work.  In the health professions, you need that hands-on work to learn a lot of what you need to learn, and practice your diagnostic and treatment skills.

Our younger daughter works in an industry which may not feel as much economic damage as some.  She works for a national food distribution company, in a very necessary job of solving problems in accounts payable.   As she is on the money end of it, that might help her job keep going.

In subsequent posts, I'll talk about such aspects of the disease as the gallows humor coming out of it, how handwashing has given rise to several mantras, and how we've had a less than stellar performance by the government (this will get political).  Stay tuned.