Blog 7: I didn’t choose the COVID-19 life…

This one’s going be a little rambly. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a hot mess for everyone, from the medical professionals swamped with potential COVID-19 cases, to millions of people being laid off, to all the students and teachers making the transition to online learning. The stock market has plummeted, and the U.S. government just approved a 2 trillion dollar stimulus package in an attempt to help people make it through the shutdown. It’s nuts, and we’re mostly playing by ear with some educated guesstimating. There’s so much controversy over what we should do, what sources we can trust, how accurate our data is, etc. And in all honesty, we won’t get the full picture until this is all over. However, I don’t feel like getting into the weeds of the accuracy of our current data, or the political and economic side-effects of this epidemic, so I’ll just talk about what’s going on for me.

So I’m an out-of-state college student, but I decided to remain here in Chapel Hill — for a multitude of reasons. I lived off campus this year and have a lease through the rest of the school year, which I don’t feel like wasting. I also have a job near campus where the business is one of the lucky (or unlucky?) few to remain open and necessitates working in person. All of my classes are online now and most have continued to teach through Zoom. My family’s place back home is in the boonies and has TERRIBLE internet that would not be able to support the streaming needed for these classes. Also, although I am not really worried about getting COVID-19, I’m probably higher risk for exposure back home because my mother is an emergency medicine physician, and her hospital is seeing a significant number of COVID-19 patients. At any rate, she doesn’t need one extra person bugging her at home since she’s got enough on her plate.

It’s been a royal pain in the butt to make the switch to online classes, especially after missing a week of classes (which is what, like a month in high school time?). I’m sure that the professors are just as inconvenienced as many of the students. They’re the ones who have to rework their schedules and completely change their teaching/exam formats. The hardest part for me is probably motivating myself to stay on top of everything without the structure that in-person classes provide. I’m just lucky enough that I have the resources to finish out the semester, which some students don’t have. There have been inconveniences (e.g. I’ve had to go to UPS to print/fax application and class documents), but nothing that I can’t adjust to.

On the bright side, I have seen more families playing together outside, and people just getting out and walking around their neighborhoods. It’s nice to see people getting out of the house and enjoying the weather despite the stress we’re all under. In addition, when the pandemic winds down, this experience will be a great learning opportunity. We will get a much better consensus on the case-fatality rate of this disease, and a better idea of the prevalence of asymptomatic carriers, among other statistics. We can compare the effectiveness of different strategies applied by different countries, and maybe even challenge common practices in Western health care. I think we have a lot to learn from this experience, and we can make adjustments to prepare for the next (and inevitable) global infectious disease, which may be even more dangerous.