Dealing with COVID-19: Learning, Working, and Living in Times of Unforeseen Adversity
I’m a college student. On a normal day, I can be seen eating, studying, and hanging out with friends in Chapel Hill. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an extrovert, but I find solace from the hardships of higher education through meaningful social interaction with a few pals, and that social interaction typically happens at the time of my choosing.
Enter COVID-19.
Being able to engage in small talk with your classmate in the quad isn’t quite something that you take for granted. Being able to engage in small talk entirely, though, truly is. It’s day 12 of quarantine here in my house, enacted after the rest of my family arrived home from a two-week trip to Denmark during what would turn out to be some of the most formative days of the pandemic the world now experiences. During those 12 days, I’ve realized that it’s the little things that I miss the most.
The CDC recommends “social distancing” of six feet or more accompanied by frequent hand-washing and the avoidance of groups of more than 10 people. Colleges across the country have been shut down, individual states are going into lockdowns, and once-bustling urban areas have ground to a screeching halt. It’s unclear as to if we’re looking at a new normal in America and across the world. Just yesterday, the President announced his hope to have the U.S. economy back up and running by Easter Sunday. Doctors have also explained why pushing for people to return to highly-populated areas during a global pandemic may be a bad idea.
There’s a lot going on right now, and it’s overwhelming for everybody. In the middle of it all, however, hope shines through in the form of human resilience.
COVID-19 has taken a lot from us: lives, jobs, social gatherings. But it’s also presented an opportunity for people to set aside their differences, put their heads together, and overcome a problem that’s simply bigger than us all. We’ve worked together to support businesses, small and large. We’ve isolated ourselves in the name of protecting those in our community. We’ve found creative outlets that we would’ve never found otherwise and we’ve coalesced over our shared love of cowboys on Twitter.
(There’s really no telling whether his last name is Send or if he thought that he would need to type the word “Send” to publish his tweet; either way, it’s wonderfully wholesome.)
No matter what we miss, lose, or think is unfair, this virus will continue to spread without proper measures being taken. We each need to do our part to slow the spread of the COVID-19, and it’s easy to get caught up in the hectic nature of the present. Hopefully, as this goes on, we can start to find hope in the future.