Life in the Time of Coronavirus

Life as we knew it before the pandemic won't return for several months, if ever.

Widespread stay-at-home orders and social distancing have created changes in nearly every aspect of our lives. Schools are closed. People are either working from home or they are suddenly unemployed. Financial worries are growing. Small business owners wonder whether their businesses will survive. Medical personnel and facilities are overwhelmed. Personal stress is through the roof. Domestic violence has increased dramatically. Lines to get food from food banks are endless. One woman in San Antonio, Texas, waited in her car for 18 hours to get a box of food -- and she was first in line. Even the best minds in medicine and epidemiology have no real idea how long this pandemic will last.

I am very lucky that the coronavirus pandemic has not caused a major change in my life, as I have been retired for nearly 10 years and I am used to spending a great deal of time at home. And as an introvert by nature, not being around lots of people is fine with me. In fact, it is what I prefer. I am still able to go outside for walks in my neighborhood. I live in an area where each house sits on a 1/2-acre lot. So social distancing isn't an issue. I have a large yard where I can do yard work while hanging out with my dogs. I have lots of books on my Kindle to keep me occupied. I continue to work on learning photo editing software.

But there are a couple of areas where I have felt the impact of the pandemic. The first is travel. I typically take eight trips every year, including a couple of international trips. I managed to get in a short hiking trip to Georgia in early March, but my planned trip to Greece this month and to Yellowstone National Park in May have been canceled. And I expect that other trips will be canceled or rescheduled before this is over. 

Another area of impact is grocery shopping. I no longer do my shopping in grocery stores. I have placed three grocery orders with WalMart and one with Albertson's, and used curbside pick-up. I never get everything on my order, as a couple of items have been out of stock each time. And it takes from one day to several days to get a time slot for picking up the groceries. That's OK, as I have plenty to eat in the meantime. I am doing all I can to stay out of public places. Shopping and paying online, and having the groceries placed into the back of my SUV, allow me to do that.

The downside to online grocery shopping is the limited selection of brands and sizes, as most of the store inventory is not online. And of course, comparison shopping is impossible. I also can't wander the aisles looking for sales and for things I might have forgotten to put on my list. I am spending a lot more on groceries during the lockdown than I ever did before. I know why: it’s because I am maintaining my stockpile of groceries due to uncertainty about when or whether I will be able to buy replacements. It's an inconvenience, but a at least I can afford to buy groceries.

With sporadic shortages and unavailability of certain foods at different times, I am much more aware of my food supply than in the past. As an example, I wanted to make a cake recently, but the recipe called for three eggs. I have eggs, but I thought about whether I wanted to use three of them in a cake when I wasn't sure I would be able to buy more eggs the next time I went shopping. I opted to save the eggs for breakfast meals. The same is true of butter.

This all reminds me of grocery shopping when I lived in Moscow in 1999. My colleagues and I would shop at the American embassy's commissary every Monday. That was the only place I could get favorite American foods such as peanut butter and Dr Pepper. I bought fresh bread (really good but without preservatives, so it had a very short shelf life) and vegetables from local women who operated small stands in busy areas. I also sometimes shopped at a Japanese-owned, Russian-operated grocery store a few blocks from my apartment. I could buy packaged food, including frozen pizzas, from Israel, Poland and Finland. So grocery shopping was an ongoing, multi-step process.

Life in the time of a pandemic is different, but I am very fortunate that I have a full freezer and pantry, and I can buy food when I want to. For so many people who have temporarily lost their jobs, getting food is a real challenge. Hundreds, even thousands, of people in cars line up outside food banks, which are struggling to keep up with the demand.

I have done more writing since the pandemic started. It's a wonderful emotional relief for me. I check in on female friends who live alone. I try to find interesting things to photograph in my neighborhood. I do a lot of reading. I listen for, and appreciate more, the sounds of nature. Some early mornings I can hear a great horned owl. Night often brings the sounds of coyotes howling and yipping. I hear quail and most recently, song birds. I spend time looking at, and sharing online, some of the many beautiful photographs I have taken during my travels.

Staying home all the time and being unable to travel have made me irritable at times. I miss photography. I miss travel. But I am grateful that I live in a sparsely populated state, one that has a governor who continues to take steps to protect the citizens as much as possible. During my rare trips to pick up groceries, I am pleased to see people wearing masks or other face coverings. Neighbors I encounter during my daily walks observe social distancing even when we stop to chat. 

No one knows how long this pandemic will last. So life's 'new normal' in the time of coronavirus will continue for the foreseeable future. We cannot count on our federal government to provide guidance, or on all governors to put sane policies into place. The governor of my state, and several others, has acted swiftly to put policies into place that are designed to protect its citizens. Now some misguided -- or are they simply selfish or stupid -- citizens in several states are demanding to be allowed to return to work and for businesses to reopen. Experts say we aren't ready for this yet, and returning to business as usual will almost certainly result in a spike in Covid-19 cases and more death. Even when my state does reopen, I plan to stay at home, limit trips to public places, and wear a mask when out and about until I feel that it is safe to venture out.

We have a clear example of what may, and likely will, happen if life returns to normal too quickly. Large crowds gathered to celebrate the end of World War I during the great flu pandemic of 1918. Thousands of people then got sick and died after being in large crowds. 

I am already in a high-risk group. I'm not going to do anything to shorten my life, regardless of Republican calls to open the economy and sacrifice human life to do so. There is no 'acceptable' level of human deaths in the name of economic gain. We are all in this together, and together we will survive or perish.