In the latest issue of the kottke.org newsletter sent out on Sunday evening, I asked readers if they would share what they’ve been up to during the pandemic and how their families and communities are coping. I received a bunch of responses and beginning today, I’m going to publish some of their experiences here and in the newsletter. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. The hope is that sharing these experiences will make us all feel a little more connected and a little less alone.
In this first installment, we’ll hear from a South African doctor, a French schoolteacher, a couple who live full-time on a boat (currently in the Bahamas), a Mississippi pastor, as well as folks from Kansas, Brazil, New Zealand, India, Ohio, and Wyoming.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length, clarity, and anonymity. If you’d like to share your experience, I’ll include submission suggestions at the end of this post. Thanks.
Patricia L. from Cape Town, South Africa:
I’m an emergency medicine doctor working in the public sector in Cape Town, South Africa. I work at a small district hospital with about 160 beds. In our emergency centre, we have 14 full time doctors and 3 intern doctors on rotation. Our hospital serves a large underprivileged population with a quadruple burden of disease at the best of times:
- HIV & TB and complications thereof
- Hypertension, diabetes and diseases of lifestyle
- Maternal, newborn and child illnesses
- Interpersonal violence and traumaOur referral centre is Groote Schuur Hospital, home of the first heart transplant, and we refer patients for specialist care and imaging if needed (eg MRI’s & CT scans, cardiology, neurosurgery etc). We have a 2-bed resuscitation unit in our emergency centre, and a 3-bed high care unit. The hospital has a total of 9 ventilators. I’m trying to find recent stats on the size of the population that we serve but I estimate it is about 4-500 000 people.
We are well accustomed to working in a resource-scarce setting, and improvisation and decisions about which patients qualify for resuscitation, ventilation and ICU care are the order of the day for us generally. I have been very interested to read media reports about the moral dilemmas facing doctors; first in Italy and now in other parts of the first world where these types of ethical decisions are less commonplace.
Our president, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced a country-wide lockdown on the 23rd of March when we had a total of about 400 confirmed cases. We have one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, with a ban on the sale of cigarettes, alcohol, non-essential items (you can’t buy a kettle at a supermarket, for example). We aren’t allowed outside our properties except to buy food and access emergency health care. Dog walking and jogging, cycling etc is forbidden. Essential workers have to have permits to travel. There are no fast food outlets open even for deliveries, and UberEats and other similar services are not operating currently. Here’s a recent BBC article about it.
Our usually inefficient & corrupt government seems to be handling this with frankly surprising aplomb and urgency, for which I am very grateful. We have a huge underprivileged population who live in overcrowded townships with little education, poor hygiene, poor access to health care and a high rate of co-infection with HIV and TB. The consequences of a situation like Italy occurring in South Africa will result in unfathomable devastation, and although we may still reach that point we have some time to prepare to mitigate what we can during these early days.
Having said that, our economy is in tatters. We have been downgraded to “junk status” by all (I think) major ratings agencies (Moody’s, Fitch etc) — the outlook has been poor for the last few years following “state capture” under president Zuma’s government. State Owned Enterprises have been run to the ground with corrupt management, and this feels like the final nail in the coffin. We have high unemployment, and a huge informal labour force which has been affected by the lockdown.
We have adequate PPE (for now): N95 & surgical masks, visors / goggles, plastic aprons, gloves and re-usable fabric theatre gowns which will be washed daily. We have limited stock of disposable waterproof gowns for intubation and high risk procedures. We don’t have access to the hazmat suits seen in China and elsewhere in the first world, arguably not sure if they are necessary. One of our doctors has sourced bulk plastic shower caps as hair protection. I have deeply conflicting feelings of guilt about the amount of plastic I am going through per shift!
It feels like we are simultaneously over and under-reacting. I am strangely excited in amongst all the apprehension and anticipation — this is what I’ve trained for, I am part of an excellent hospital team, and we are ready to rise to the challenge despite all the fear and uncertainty.
Anne B. from central France:
I’m a high school teacher. Been on lock down for three weeks now, teaching from home. My students who have always been nice are going through a unique experience which compels them to be very autonomous and mature. As a teacher, I’ve always been close to my students but this thing has brought on a whole new level! I have to admit I enjoy talking to them as if I were the manager of their department, for real. I also make the most of the extra time to give personalized and customized advice to each of them when they send work.
I am glad I live in France and I know that no matter your social background and bank account status, if you get sick, you get treated the same way and for free.
I live in an a small town, and although I am interested in my surroundings, this lock down with limited freedom outside has compelled me to pay even closer attention to my neighborhood and getting to know the community I live in, people-wise (staying a few yards away though). We feel comfort, gathering outside our homes at 8 pm every single evening to clap and cheer for all the people still working in grocery shops, transports, doctors, nurses etc. Tonight we even shared a glass of wine in the middle of our street, still a few yards away from each other, this distancing is more physical than social… I’ve been feeling closer to my friends, family and colleagues and for the first time ever, hallelujah to WhatsApp!
Hugh H. reports from Jackson, Mississippi:
I live in Jackson, MS, which is somewhere between Yonkers and Syracuse in size — something like 170,000 people, and the largest city in Mississippi. Some things about Jackson that make this particularly difficult is that Jackson was already desperately poor before all this went down — 25% of the city has a household income of less than $15,000 a year, and 75% of the the city was a USDA food desert when everything is “normal”.
As a result, most of Jackson has to travel significant distances to go to the grocery store, and there aren’t huge amounts of money floating around to buy up supplies, anyway. So a big part of my work, as the pastor of a small church down here has been helping people get access to food and supplies.
The Governor enacted a stay-at-home order last week, and most of Jackson is a ghost town. The parking lots of the big box stores (Target, Walmart, Kroger, etc.) are relatively full, but you don’t see cars elsewhere. In the stores, perhaps 1 in 4 folks are wearing masks, but that really just started this weekend. All restaurants in Jackson are now, if they stayed open, take out only. Liquor stores are deemed an essential business.
Jackson is a pessimistic place. Life here makes you hard, and hope often seems far away — and that is when everything is “normal”. So, things are bleak, but I think they will get worse because I think we are in this for months, not weeks, and I don’t think that idea has hit a lot of folks here yet.
Alana C. wrote in from southeastern Kansas (with a “P.S.” that her sourdough starter is on day 4):
Our county of 13,000 has not yet had a confirmed case, but there’s at least 1 in all the surrounding counties. We are fortunate to still have 2 hospitals in the area, my town is in between them, about 9 miles either direction. 5 hospitals have closed in SE Kansas in the last 3 years, and we are still without Medicaid expansion so we are very, very lucky to still have options. Like with all rural hospitals, they usually airlift or drive the worst cases to Lawrence, KC, or Wichita, which of course isn’t an option right now. If we keep up the social distancing the way we’ve been, which there’s for sure a lot of grumbling about, I think they’ll be OK. I know there are a lot of Fox News Boomers in the area, and even more comorbidities, but a few pillars of the community took this seriously early, which I know made a big difference. The main job path here if you’re a woman who isn’t planning on leaving and never coming back, is to become a nurse, so maybe that has also helped to get people to take it seriously. Compared to the rural South, we’re doing pretty good.
I keep thinking about the parade we had for the Chiefs in Kansas City on February 5th, and am so thankful that the weather was awful that day so the turnout wasn’t massive, but mostly that it wasn’t a couple weeks later. It would have been our Mardi Gras. I have so many friends who went, and the thought of what could have been is horrifying.
Louise H. is on a boat in the Bahamas:
We are US citizens, and live full time on our boat. We (me, my husband, and our 19 year old cat) are currently cruising in the Bahamas. We had planned to be here for March, April and May, and had purchased 3 months of basic provisions before leaving at the end of February. (Yes, I might have accidentally started the toilet paper hoarding.) Food is VERY expensive here, so we try to only buy fresh fruits and veggies to supplement our packed cabinets and freezer.
We arrived in country just as the virus was starting to be news in the US, so we avoided large crowds, then small crowds, then everyone. We are anchored near a small island, Staniel Cay, with about 50 other boats. The island itself has a population of only around 150, so we feel very isolated and safe from the virus here. However, in the last week, the number of cases in the Bahamas have been growing, and the first death was on another small island. With only 70 ventilators in the entire country, and those 70 are only on two (out of hundreds) islands, the Bahamians are getting understandably very nervous and have instituted curfews. This weekend was a complete lockdown, with even grocery stores closed until Monday.
We feel extremely lucky to be here in this beautiful place, able to avoid most people, and be completely self-sufficient. We would have stayed until the start of hurricane season, but Saturday evening (April 4) the US Embassy advised all Americans to return to the US, whether we are tourists who arrived by commercial flight or in private boats. The risk now is too great that the Bahamian government, in order to stop the viral spread between islands, will stop all boat traffic indefinitely, trapping us here, unable to access medical care or escape hurricanes. So tomorrow morning we will set sail back to Florida, a trip which will take us about 4 days. Many other American and Canadian boaters are doing the same. It’s a nice community; we keep in contact over the radio, offering advice on engine repair. Several families with young kids on board organized a trivia night over the radio, and we even heard some makeshift karaoke floating across the water. Perhaps we’ll be able to actually meet them face to face on another trip, or in another place.
Rick M. from Tokyo, Japan sent a post he wrote about how he’s approaching his kids’ learning:
After a few weeks into this stay-at-home situation, it became very apparent that neither myself nor my kid were especially interested in assuming a teacher-student relationship. But what came as a big surprise was that the kid was open to flipping those roles, i.e. she was really eager to teach me something. So she has been teaching me some basic ballet (which she’s studied for a couple of years) for about 20 minutes a day. I won’t go into details here about how I’m doing (no one needs that mental picture) but my échappé-to-arabesque is pretty dope.
It turns out that her love of dance is keeping keeping her quite active even while she’s been house-bound. I always thought that ballet was kind of stupid and elitist, but it’s certainly coming in handy now. Rearranging the furniture to be less centered on the TV and more in favor of open space dancing was a bad idea my wife had months back, but in these past few weeks it has become less bad.
Scott G. in a central Ohio suburb:
Here in our small tree-lined suburb in central Ohio, we have been carefully observing the social distancing and stay home instructions for nearly four weeks now. As native southerners, we count ourselves lucky to live in Ohio where our (Republican, wow!) governor acted early and rapidly to take measures to flatten the curve of Covid-19. In his first address on the subject he proclaimed that he would be “guided by science” in passing guidelines to protect us, and we look at other less-proactive states and worry about our families there.
Life at home for our family of three has revolved around working, cooking (which we didn’t do much of before) and when we do venture out for take-out we try to support our favorite local restaurants that are struggling with less than 30% of their normal business. I’m a huge fan of our many local coffee shops, and after trying to stay open for carry-out they have all now closed, some maybe forever.
We count ourselves fortunate to be here together and make the best of staying in and taking care of each other. I know we’ll never take for granted coffee or lunch with a friend, eating in our local restaurants and the value of our personal relationships.
M. writes from Brazil:
We are experiencing here what I would call the paradox of the cordial man. Cordial man is a concept by anthropologist Sergio Buarque de Holanda who suggests that Brazilians do not distinguish between public and private, that everything can be interpreted from the perspective of cordis, from the heart. His concept goes deeper to explain the relations of colonial Brazil and our greater family structure.
Anyway, what we have in the last few days are people who disobey the recommendations to stay at home, either because they are followers of the president, or because they are uninformed or because they either need to go or return to their jobs. On the other hand, people who think it is absurd for a group to still be on the streets, even if only for a few moments, or keep the distance suggested, because it is fatally endangering the lives of other people. That is, is this not the paradox of the cordial man? Whoever is still on the streets only sees the prism from its individual perspective. But those who are at home complaining about who is on the street are concerned that the first one will steal their hospital bed or endanger the life of a loved one. At no time there is a collective understanding, but always from cordial perspectives, from cordis.
I was unable to find a good English summary/discussion of Buarque de Holanda’s cordial man theory, but this comes close.
Nicki C. from Wellington, New Zealand:
We’ve just finished our second weekend of a 4-week nation-wide lockdown. This currently lasts until 23rd of April, and release of the lockdown will depend on how well we all go at preventing the spread of the virus. We locked down pretty early (when we had 283 cases in total) and have gone hard. EVERYTHING is closed except for supermarkets, gas stations, pharmacies and doctors offices. People are allowed out of their homes to go to an essential service (like to get groceries) and do exercise locally, such as walking or running. Swimming and surfing (lots of people live close to beaches), mountain biking, hiking and tramping are not allowed. That’s really hard for such an outdoors-based country like ours. It has been challenging for the government to determine what’s considered an essential service. Obviously businesses don’t want to close down completely because of the massive economic impact, so there’s a lot of lobbying to relax the restrictions. It’s slowly happening in some areas — for example, online delivery of alcohol is now allowed — but not in others, no magazines or non-daily newspapers are allowed to publish.
The fallout from our lockdown is going to be massive. No one is really confident at what it will look like, but numbers being thrown around are 30% of small to medium businesses (the category which most of our businesses fall into) will not be able to reopen when the lockdown is lifted. Thousands of people are being made redundant. It’s like nothing most of us have seen in our lifetimes here. Even the GFC didn’t have this bad an impact on our economy. Our parliament (the house of government) is closed, with most of our Members of Parliament locked down at home like the rest of us. What we have in place of the normal sitting of both government and the opposition parties, is a committee made up of representatives of all parties who scrutinise how the government is responding to the virus. The daily sittings of this committee are broadcast online so anyone can see what’s being asked and answered. This seems to be working well and at least safeguards some of our democracy in a time when we’re effectively on a war-footing.
In my suburb, the community spirit is amazing. There are a lot of kids who live around here and their parents take them out for walks most days to go on a bear hunt — most of the houses have teddy bears and soft toys in their windows and the kids get to hunt them out. It’s lovely hearing their excited voices when a new teddy is in the window. Lots of streets, ours included, have started Facebook groups to keep in touch and use for localised help and support. People have been findings all kinds of creative ways to keep themselves occupied. This is one of my favourites. There are so many more good stories than bad ones — but I have definitely seen social media’s bias towards complaints and horror stories come out. I’ve had to stop reading Facebook comments because it’s just too aggravating and depressing.
I’m working from home, but a lot quieter than is normal for this time of the year. My business works a lot with government departments and they are understandably refocused on virus response activities. This means projects we were working on are deferred or on hold for now. No one really knows when it will get back to ‘normal’ — I suspect that normal when this is over won’t look like normal did before it started. One really good thing to come from this is the rapid proving of the whole remote working thing. I see my team more often now than I did when we all worked in the same office! I hope that continues post-lockdown.
My overarching observation of this whole horrible situation is that it makes the world feel so much smaller and more human than I have ever felt it to be. Even with the dickheads and idiots (some of whom are in positions of power), I can feel the essential humanity of all of us fighting together to beat this thing. That gives me such hope for the future.
Jason K. writes in from central Vermont (Hi, this is me…you can find the rest of my story in the newsletter):
Some people here are really not happy about out-of-state visitors and those with second homes (from NYC, Boston, etc.) coming up to Vermont to ride out the pandemic. There’s a 14-day quarantine mandated for out-of-state or returning residents, but that’s largely unenforceable — we can only hope people comply with it. There were folks on a local mailing list calling for the governor to close the state borders, but most are supportive of out-of-staters with VT ties being here (as long as they are being responsible). Vermont is a small state with limited medical capability, but in normal times VT also relies heavily on tourism and out-of-state visitors & second home owners who spend heavily here and provide tax income to the state and local communities. So it’s an interesting dynamic/dilemma.
Sujay A. writes from Bengaluru, India:
The whole of India has been under a 21-day lockdown (started on 25th of March). Once the current lockdown ends, they might relax the lockdown in unaffected regions, and continue it in affected regions. We are not supposed to step out of our houses unless there is a strong reason to do so. Some of the strong reasons for most people include buying essentials, attending to family emergency, banking (reduced hours), etc. All factories and offices have either been shut down, or the employees have been asked to work from home. I get to work from home, and I recognise how privileged my position is.
The essentials such as fruits, vegetables, groceries, medicine, etc. are mostly available in grocery stores (kiranas), supermarkets, and push carts (most people buy their vegetables from them since it is most convenient, you just buy outside your door on the street). The government assures us that there is enough for everyone, and that we should not panic.
The restaurants are all closed for dining, only online deliveries and takeouts are available. Online stores such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Big Basket are only taking orders for essentials. Cab services such as Uber and Ola are shut down. The auto rickshaws, metro, and local buses are off service. All the parks, markets, lakes, malls, and cinemas are closed. We are expected to do any exercise indoors. It’s quite eery to see the streets being empty in Bangalore.
I live in an apartment complex, which is lucky for me since we have good landscaping and I can take walks. Kids within our apartment complex have a lot of area to play and enjoy a bit.
The vast majority of people in India live as a “joint family” (myself included). This basically means that the three generations live in the same house. This makes it all the more important for everyone to stay safe since you can get the elderly infected quite easily.
So far India has done a commendable job with restricting the infections. India started screening international passengers from affected countries starting in January as soon as the news from Wuhan broke. We are not doing as many tests as we would like. The biggest fear for India is if the disease spreads among the “community”. With India’s population and density, it’s going to be impossible to bring things to control. We are all hoping for the best, and the authorities seem to be doing the best they can. Hopefully it’ll be enough.
Steve J. writes in from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada.
School is suspended indefinitely and everyone is home. I’m fortunate to have a family who gets along well and children (10 and 12) who I don’t have to worry about if they miss school for an extended run. I’ve tried to focus on how lucky we are as a family to be able to be together and sustain ourselves. One of the things I heard on the radio early in this period was a discussion on CBC Radio’s As It Happens (one of the nation’s greatest radio programmes, and a great source of information at a time like this) with authors Margaret Atwood, Waubgeshig Rice and Daniel Kalla. Something Rice, an Indigenous author, said, really stuck with me: “I think we’re all scared in some ways. But I think if your first response is fear, it’s important to acknowledge your privilege in that you maybe haven’t been to the brink before. Whereas a lot of marginalized communities have experienced that and continue to experience that. And there’s a long list of examples in Canada of world ending for different communities. You know, you can look at the destruction of Africville in Nova Scotia or the internment of Japanese Canadians. You know, it’s important to take a look at what your personal perspective is and your place in society and just, you know, acknowledge that privilege of being part of the dominant culture and things being generally good in Canada in the last 150 years or so.” I try to remember this as I think about my own fears and my own family’s situation.
I run a biomedical teaching lab for youth at a research building at one of the major hospitals in the city. My building and operation is shut down and we’re now trying to figure out how to carry on some sort of experiential learning for the teachers and students that we would regularly work with. Although I don’t have to go in, I just started volunteering to do staff screening at the main entrance to the hospital for 2.5h early every morning so they don’t have to pull nurses off of wards to screen employees and so maybe I can feel like I’m doing something to help. This entails me and others running through the list of symptoms and possible contacts with every employee as they show up for the morning shift, so every morning I get to interact with surgeons, managers, housekeepers, technicians, food service staff, maintenance, nurses and everyone else who is part of making the operation hold together. It’s hard to read how everyone is feeling, there’s certainly anxiety and stress, but there’s also resolve, dedication and still many smiles on faces that let me know we’ll pull through this in some way.
An anonymous reader from southwest Wyoming:
It’s strange to think about having to shelter in place when we have so much empty space that we can occupy our time with outside, so people are still out and about around our town. And I am completely in favor of shelter in place policies in major metro areas, but somehow it just doesn’t seem like it would work here given the political and personal leanings of the people of Wyoming. I am new to Wyoming (have lived here 2.5 years), but there is a certain way people seem to think this is still the old west and, for better or worse, they tend to have that independent spirit. The virus has just recently arrived in our county, but to be honest the scariest thing for me is the fact that this is Trump country and that people believe him. I’m more scared of jackasses flaunting this as a hoax and not taking the proper precautions when they are at the grocery store with me or my family.
Thanks again to all those who wrote in. I’ll be posting more stories from readers in subsequent posts. After reading these stories (and a bunch more that are in the queue), I feel compelled to remind you that kottke.org’s readership obviously is not a representative sample of humanity. Also, the folks who are most likely to write in are those with a bit of time & energy on their hands, not generally those who are overwhelmed while trying to work with small children at home 24/7, doing 16-hour shifts at the hospital, working at the grocery store 6 days a week, or finding themselves with limited internet access at home, which makes the site’s unrepresentative readership even more unrepresentative. Just thought that was important to keep in mind.
If you’d like to share your story or perspective, just send me an email. Just a paragraph or two is fine and please include your location (vague is fine, e.g. “central Vermont”). When sharing, I’ll use your first name, the first initial of your last name, and your location — otherwise, please let me know if you’d like to remain anonymous or if you don’t want me sharing your story publicly at all.
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