I survived COVID and all I got was this email.
While COVID-19 has not ceased to be a thing in our world, for better or for worse, it does seem that we’ve largely settled into a kind of normalcy. And while our world doesn’t look like it did in 2019, I wanted to take some time to appreciate the contrast between the present and some of the strangeness of 2020. Because in retrospect it was all really weird and I don’t want to forget about it.
First cases in the United States
While everything escalated very quickly, it is strange to look back on how slow it all seemed to start. Everett, a city just north of my home town of Seattle, had the honor of being where COVID-19 was first observed in the United States. In hindsight it didn’t last very long, but I personally remember a feeling of "whew, glad they caught that one." For a brief glorious moment, it looked like we might have averted disaster and that the right folks were on top of it.
It is also crazy to think we didn’t exactly know how it spread at the time. And while we knew China was in deep trouble, I think there was some optimism that we had the tools and processes in place to make it a non-event on this side of the ocean.
Of course, that didn’t last long.
Blocks from our home, the local authorities were setting up a quarantine facility in anticipation of more cases. There was space for four families which, while with hindsight seems incredibly naive, also felt like a major escalation of the crisis. (Perhaps more so to us, being so close to the actual facility.)
As cases started to crop up in the community, it looked like we might need to resort to field hospitals. (Luckily, in this case it looks like we overshot, and the field hospital was quietly taken down a month or so later, without ever being used.)
Meanwhile, in daycare…
In January of 2020, other changes were taking place. We had just started Amelia in a daycare near my partner’s office. This was Amelia’s first time in daycare, and as often happens to children in that situation, she was there only a few days before getting sick.
At one point around January or February-ish, she came down with (and also passed to me) a respiratory virus that was severe enough that we both had to sleep together in a chair sitting up; it was the only way we could breath at night. Amelia went to her pediatrician where they thought it was severe enough to order chest x-rays (if you want to see something funny, search “toddler chest xray” to see how they accomplish this). I was also sick enough to warrant a visit to urgent care where they both reassured me it couldn’t be COVID because I hadn’t been to China, but also remarked that they had been seeing a lot of people with unexplained respiratory difficulties.
Was I an early victim of COVID? I’m not ruling it out is all.
Toilet Paper
When it started looking like COVID might actually be a thing that wasn’t just going to go away, I took an afternoon and ran to Costco to preemptively stock up on household goods. I bought like two Costco sized things of toilet paper. My partner, on her own, on the same day, placed a bulk order through Amazon.
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| My COVID-prepper Costco haul. |
We had a lot of toilet paper as a result.
Which was good, because it was hard to get for a while. It was a hot commodity. People talked about where you could get toilet paper. We’d look longing at empty shelves in the toilet paper aisle of grocery stores. Limits were in place. Zoom backgrounds were changed to make it look like one was hiding in a fort made of toilet paper. To this day, I keep an extra Costco-sized package with our other emergency stuff.
Someday kids are going to wonder why their parents are so concerned with their toilet paper stock.
Work
Work for my partner and I was already a mix of office and home due to our daughter continuously getting sick in her new daycare.
My employer, Stripe, did an excellent job of prioritizing the safety of its employees. There were a couple of temporary office closures early on as our workplace managers learned of employees being potentially exposed to COVID. During each of these closures, the company performed a deep cleaning of the environment before allowing us to return. Many Clorox wipes were used.
Sometime in the first quarter of 2020 we finally decided to close the workplace for good (or at least until the whole COVID thing blew over). At the time, I recall a general feeling that this was all temporary and we would be back soon. I don’t recall the exact date that was our final day in the office in 2020, because I was actually sick at home at the time.
For a period of time, the office felt very Chernobyl-eque, with things more or less left in place. As time went on, we were allowed to schedule time to retrieve our personal possessions and take IT equipment home, as we settled into our new remote work lives.
Even after we finally returned, it was common to see items abandoned by their previous owners; a stack of books for a book club that never took place.
We had one office at home that was shared by my partner and myself. We would move around the house as we accommodated each others’ need to take a phone call. Items like paper screens were tried as we each attempted to build a suitable working environment.
For a short period of time, we even moved a desk to our backyard shed (which up until now had been used for bikes and the lawnmower). With a long enough extension cord from the house and an ethernet cable running out of a window, this worked well enough until autumn came and we could not pump enough watts of heat to keep it habitable.
Eventually, our household rearranged itself enough for us to find sufficient working space. A desk in the bedroom is at least warm.
Eating
COVID brought a whole new set of rituals when it came to acquiring food. Us being on the more affluent and also paranoid side switched to delivery for most of our groceries. Instacart and Amazon Fresh were huge expenditures. Back then, we didn’t know exactly how COVID was being transmitted, so we would wipe down everything left on our doorstep before bringing it inside.
Certain food items became hard to come by. Milk was especially challenging. For the first time since I was a kid, I had a milkman making weekly deliveries.
For when we did venture out, we paid attention to the low traffic times and the six foot rule. Again, everything was wiped down before coming into the house.
Ordering food from restaurants for us felt like an extreme luxury. I also felt a tension between this sense that I should continue to patronize my favorite restaurants and a paranoia that I was asking the staff there to expose themselves to unnecessary risk for my benefit.
I still remember the first take out we got during COVID was from Great State Burger. We couldn’t wipe down burgers, but with a mask and gloves on, I carefully repackaged the food from outside onto our own plates before allowing it into the house.
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| A commonly seen sign explaining social distancing rules. |
Masks
The controversy around the early guidance around masking is well known, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say, lots of us wanted masks but were unable to secure the real deal due to the sudden spike in demand and the (correctly) prioritized needs of those working in health care.
As it was with toilet paper, we got a head start here. We were actually well stocked with N95-type masks due to the fire season. However, this was not much stock in the context of the pandemic, so like many others, we went through our own journey through questionable cloth masks.
Our basic strategy at the time was a shotgun approach. If you had a novel mask, you could probably secure at least $20 from me. Someone at work was selling them as a side business. I preordered a bunch of these Honeywell masks which ended up being pretty neat. I’m now on Buck Mason’s mailing list forever because they sold masks briefly.
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| A toddler with a mask. |
The absolute worst were these masks produced by Purple (the mattress company). They appeared to be made out of the same material as their pillows and the masks perfectly replicated the sensation of being suffocated by one.
We eventually settled on Happy Mask as our preferred brand. These were hand-washable a limited number of times. At one point, they were so in demand that you had to register in advance for a time window to buy them online. I still have a pile of unopened ones we never ended up using. I feel bad for the company struggling to maintain relevance. I guess they make hats now.
For all the trouble, I am glad that masking in public enough is normal enough to not turn heads. Public transportation in the winter always felt a bit sketchy, so I’m grateful that no one thinks much of someone throwing on a mask on a crowded bus.
Chemistry sets
If you would have told me in 2019 that everyone in Seattle would have little chemistry kits in their homes in the next year, I would have assumed it had something to do with the meth epidemic.
We did the little dropper-watch-the-lines-appear test the same as everyone.
Google was also kind enough to provide Yuling with a Cue, which certainly felt like it would be more accurate.
Specially Occasions
I did attend my first and probably only Zoom wedding. The medium allowed the innovative experience of following a live stream as the couple tried to navigate their way to the court house. Normally you don’t get to see the juicy behind the scenes stuff.
Halloween became super innovative. For a while, our street has been big on Halloween, and we weren’t about to let COVID stand in the way. We adapted by having various socially-distant candy disbursement mechanisms. The simplest form was a bowl of candy out by the street. Our neighbors had a candy-deploying chute. We strung up candy bars on twine for people to come and pick from.
Virtual daycare
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| Image of a near by elementary school. (Not ours.) |
After several incidents of Amelia getting sick in daycare, we opted to pull her out and find another solution. (As it happened, the daycare she was attending closed soon after due to COVID-19 restrictions).
We briefly hired a nanny to look after Amelia at home. This worked for a couple of weeks before the fear of COVID shut this plan down too. However, at the time, no one was really sure how long the restrictions would last. We ended up keeping the nanny on payroll for several months (keeping a lock on a valuable childcare provider) hoping that restrictions would be lifted. However, eventually we had to throw in the towel and go back to family-based care in the home.
Grandma-care was supplemented by some valiant but ultimately failed attempts at participating in a co-op preschool program over Zoom. We would pick up activity kits made by a teacher and then do “activities” together over Zoom. Sometimes I would read a story to a bunch of parents with their toddlers wandering around in the background. A- for effort, but this didn’t work.
For a while, our primary source of respite from the isolation were walks. We settled on a routine of picking different Seattle neighborhoods and then just wondering about. No one else seemed to be doing this, so it felt properly socially distant. It was something to do.
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| Walks through a random neighborhood. |
How did it end?
Slowly. Grocery shopping online turned into grocery shopping in person, with masks. Taking walks with masks turned into walks without masks. Eventually we stopped scrubbing everything that came into the house. Sat closer to other people at restaurants.
There were two big transition points I remember: a better understanding that the disease was spreading through the air, and when we eventually were vaccinated.
Each of us crammed into line to get COVID vaccines when they first became available. I received my first dose from the Yakima fairgrounds. (A mass vaccination facility had been set up, but since they didn’t do it close to where a large part of the population actually lived, workers there ended up making posts on Facebook basically begging folks to cross the mountains for a vaccine if they wanted one.) The second dose I received through a mass clinic at Amazon’s meeting center.
Work started allowing visits with proof of vaccination. I remember the whole thing feeling a bit silly because the office assured us they were doing their best to keep us safe by sanitizing all surfaces, but then we’d all eat together in a crowded lunchroom with no masks. I’m pretty wiping down the arm rests each night wasn’t do much for anyone.
And eventually we all got COVID (most likely of the Omicron variety). It was fine. Mostly I just remember bread tasting weird.