2020: The Year of Plague, Entry 1: The Beginning

[amethyst73]

It’s March 14, 2021. I should have been writing a lot more over the past year; it’s the first anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic and of the various (mostly horrible) things that have happened to the world since as a result: lockdowns, massive unemployment, remote schooling, etc. Lots of people have been posting their memories of the beginning. Since a lot has happened, I figured I should make this a long entry, or series of entries. (ETA: after having written this entry and made a list of Important Things in the last year, it'll be a series!)

Back in January 2020, there were noises coming out of China that a nasty disease had arisen. You got something that felt like a bad cold, with a really bad cough. And you survived… or you didn’t. At some point on a daily basis the case numbers doubled, and doubled, and doubled again, till there were upwards of 20,000 new cases being reported daily (I think? Maybe it was worldwide, not just China). I think that’s when a number of Americans (me included) started getting worried. This was probably in mid- to late-February.

We hosted an 80th birthday party celebration for my mother-in-law on her birthday, February 29, 2020. Neither Peter nor I was particularly pleased by the idea of being around a lot of people who would all want to hug and kiss us, but fortunately nobody was sick. It was the last in-person gathering of any size that I’ve been to in over a year.

Sometime before the CDC started recommending everyone wear masks, the local Whole Foods started limiting the number of people inside the store at any given time, and I noticed that the other people waiting in line outside were wearing surgical masks or bandannas. I decided that this seemed like a good idea and started wearing my Vogmask, which I’d purchased 1.5 years before during the first of the really bad smoke-from-the-northern-fires seasons. (It had a valve. We hadn’t been told yet that valves were a no-no.) But it gave N95 level protection, and I figured I might as well wear it, since I wasn’t taking a high-quality mask out of the (stupidly, badly stretched) supply line for medical personnel.

I bought extra spaghetti and spaghetti sauce somewhere in there.

I was working for a Stanford professor at the time. He had elected to go to Hawaii for a business schmooze sometime the week of March 9. (Don’t ask me, I dunno.) There had been murmurs around the department of a possible shutdown, probably starting the following week; meanwhile, there were a couple of different emails from my professor to the lab to the effect of “I will be back in lab Wednesday” with the unspoken expectation that everyone else would be too. (Charming fellow, I know.) We all came into work Monday 3/16/20, and there was an email from the department telling people not to start anything they couldn’t finish that same day. We all did what we could to pause experiments and put reagents into long-term storage. Lo and behold, come the end of the day we were explicitly told not to come in again unless we were on our lab’s Essential Personnel list. The Bay Area was going into lockdown that evening.

Oh. The other thing that was going on in our lives literally right then was that a month ago we’d put down an offer on a house in Scotts Valley, CA. We’d been living in Redwood City, an increasingly densely populated suburbia, for 18 years. The noise of the traffic, trains, and people was getting harder and harder to deal with, and we longed to move someplace with more nature and less noise. We drove over to Scotts Valley Sunday March 15 and signed many many many pieces of paper, closing the sale. (We did this inside a small office, somewhat distanced. I don’t think we were masked. But we did wash our hands thoroughly afterwards.) Santa Cruz County went into lockdown a day or two after the rest of the Bay Area, but fortunately our papers cleared the title company without issue.

That's enough for one entry. More will come, and I'll try to make them fairly quickly.