The virus known as Covid-19 is sweeping the world, an official pandemic. I have been mostly staying home with my family for the past week, as soon as we flew back from Arizona. The suggestion is to limit contact with others for 14, to self quarantine. Covid-19 has been in the news for the past three months. My oldest sister lives in Hong Kong and their schools have been closed for seven weeks. She has been keeping my family updated with articles and posts of official case counts, recovery counts, death counts worldwide and also country or location wide. Maybe we should have seen it coming when Wuhan and other China provinces went on lockdown, millions of people not able to leave or go to work or be in crowds with others.
At the end of February, one of my work colleagues sent an email out saying with the stock market dropping 5% we may want to look at our allocations, I wrote back “It’s only a loss if you sell and convert the paper loss to a real loss”. As of yesterday the stock market is down almost 30% from it’s previous February high. We have entered a bear market and possibly the beginning of a recession in the United States (two quarters of negative growth will have to pass to be a recession). Two days before we left for Arizona, the beginning of March, our school district cancelled all domestic and international trips planned for March and April, this sh*& was getting real.
A week ago as we were in Arizona, we were watching the news every day, the things we heard seemed unbelievable. So many people testing positive in Italy it was overwhelming the health care system, doctors and nurses were having to triage and choose who would live and who would not get their resources (there are limited respirator masks). Northern Italy closing the borders, businesses closing, quarantine where you are, schools closed. As we were getting ready to leave, our US president said that Friday only Americans could fly back to US and not through most International cities, and then they would need to self quarantine for 14 days. We were on Spring Break, due to return to work on Monday. Our Superintendent extended Spring Break for students by a week, the governor of Alaska then closed schools until March 30th. This week we are contacting families to see their needs and resources. The word “unprecedented” is used often now. I have been using the term “new frontier” (not to be confused with Kennedy’s policies).
I’ve been working from home. For the last three days I’ve also been nursing a cold. My husband has been throwing up, nauseous, eating very little the last three days. My kids are home – we are keeping them out of day care at least for 14 days, possibly more. My father – in -law seems to be doing well for his 84 years of age. I’ve hosted a Zoom call for the first time, called more than 20 families to survey, I’m in the process of grading so I can submit quarter 3 grades. My kids are watching lots of Netflix and Cable cartoons, their current favorites are the show “Miraculous” (Ladybug and Cat Noir) and “Peppa Pig”. While LAKOS takes her nap I’m trying to do some reading, writing, and math work with AJ. The kids have also been playing outside multiple times a day, we had fresh snow this morning even. We have been playing board games like Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, Sorry, and Scrabble. I did have a fantasy I would wake up at 5am and go to the gym pool and swim laps (I did it once – Sunday at 8:30am), but today at 5pm per the Governor’s mandate, all gyms are now closed.
The store shelves are more bare than we have ever seen them. The first hot items people began buying up were toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bleach and cleaning related products. The stores wised up and limited purchases. I purchased two bidets last December, sadly I still have not installed them. Canned fruits were minimal, dried pasta gone. I have visions of us being able to eat all those forgotten about items in our freezer and those cans or boxes of food in the pantry that I always pass over. Today I made an apple pie with a canned apple pie filling that expired a year ago. Yay!
As Ever, SOS
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