My last day of physical school was Friday, March 13, 2020. The first time I had heard of the Coronavirus was on the news, around December of 2019. After that, I kept on hearing more and more reports of cases, and slowly enough, it had spread over to Europe. From Europe to the first few cases in Seattle. From Seattle to the whole world. When schools closed down for two weeks, I was rather relieved, as my teachers were being quite lenient with assignments, so I didn't have much homework to worry about. I finally had more time to spend with my family, to sleep and revisit hobbies I hadn't done in a while. In those two weeks, my family decided to start and finish famous franchises such as the movies from Marvel Studios and all the Star Wars episodes. Like everyone else, we dabbled a bit in cooking and baking, making new things every week.
Nonetheless, when it came to groceries, it was time-consuming. My mom would go out about every two weeks, and when she would come back, we would sanitize the bags, the boxed foods, wash the fresh food and let them dry. We stored canned and boxed food in our basement, so we didn't worry about that too much. The only thing we worried about was milk. Milk is something in my household that needs to be present at all times, as I and my sister drink milk when we wake up, and my parents drink chai, which still requires milk. It's how we start our mornings. We also needed milk when we would want to make homemade yogurt, or dahi as we call it. Like I mentioned before, we would buy groceries every 2 weeks, as we wanted to limit the number of times we stepped outside, but we would finish a Kirkland box of 3 milk cartons in one week. On top of that, we couldn't store extra amounts of milk because we didn't have a fridge big enough to fit both milk and the other foods we had stocked on. Luckily, we did find a solution through a neighbor. They had told us that they would get weekly milk deliveries directly from a farm, and we thought we'd try it out. We started getting it, and it was pretty convenient, and we enjoyed it. Funny enough, the last time we bought milk from a grocery store, I could taste the difference between store brought and the weekly milk deliveries.
However, it didn't take long until the feeling of isolation crept over. After the two weeks had ended, we thought we would go back to school, but our quarantine was extended. And again and again.
Looking back, I too wish that we took precautions as seriously as Wuhan did, as they only had a lockdown for 76 days, and we never really had one, but it took a while for us to recover. Not being able to meet my friends kinda took a toll on me, and I just felt a bit down for a while. I would make sure that I would go for walks just to get outside the house, and I would FaceTime and chat with my friends nearly every day. When the author of the Wuhan Diaries says that it must've been torture for adults with small children, as they're "jumping off the walls", and having a younger sister who was 5 at the time, I completely agree. Younger children, like to play with others, whereas older children prefer to talk or chat. At first, she was a tad bit confused about not being able to go over to a friend's house, so we tried to explain to her what was happening, and she understood that she couldn't physically go over and play. So instead, she would play through Facetime, and she would play for hours, but at least she was getting social interaction.
After the first few months of the pandemic, things started to ease up, and we realized that we didn't need all those extra precautions that we were taking, and that making sure that we washed the fresh produce and our hands were enough. During the summer months, we would meet our neighbours outside while taking walks, and my sister would play with her friends outside. I was going to nearby tennis courts to make up all the classes I missed in the spring, and we would play outside, so we necessarily didn't need to wear our masks, but we were 6 feet apart. By the time our birthdays came around, we were able to invite our closest friend and their family.
I'm not gonna deny that at first, the pandemic was really scary, and hearing about the amounts of deaths every day just made me even more worried. By the time the vaccine was created, it seemed that things were going to be okay, and maybe in the future, things would be all fine. As of now, a lot of my friends' parents have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, including my parents, and schools have opened again. Recovery will take a while, but the world has recovered from the Spanish Influenza about 100 years ago, when we didn't even have all of the medical advancents we have today. If we can recover from that, we can recover from Covid-19 too.