Year in Review 2020: Novel Coronavirus Appendix
I am working on my annual year-in-review post. Since this is an unusual year which is not well captured in the typical format, this appendix is a timeline of how the Covid-19 pandemic played out in my household.
In late January, I think January 20 or 21, my sister flew to southern China, where our friend Raiff taught English, to spend the Lunar New Year holiday with him. On I think January 24, they crossed into Hong Kong for an overnight trip (lunar new year's eve) and then the borders closed. They spent the next several weeks visiting various other East Asian countries, waiting for things to stabilize, unable to return to China, where Raiff's apartment and their belongings were.
In the US and in Asia, it seemed like this might be a China problem, because the government of China has a long history of not being honest about what's up. It was anybody's guess whether they were lying about it being very bad so that they could enact government policies they wanted to enact, or lying about it being safer than it was so they could gain prestige. Chinese friends of mine couldn't tell and neither could journalists who cover China. We knew there was something weird but not in which direction. I was angry that people in Boston were avoiding Lunar New Year celebrations but not Valentine's Day celebrations, for instance. "People wouldn't do this for the flu," I said. "This is about China." I was right that people's behavior was about racism but incorrect that it was like the flu, which is what the WHO was saying at the time.
In early February, there started to be a lot of Covid deaths in Italy, and our friends and relatives there started to go into mandatory lockdowns. A lot of this was dismissed in the US as Italy having a bad health system, but since Ciro and I had lived there we knew this wasn't true. We were hearing direct reports from our people on the ground and were also reading Italian newspapers. All the international health organizations were still saying it was droplet transmission and similar to a bad case of the flu, and that there were no signs of pre-symptomatic contagion.
On February 12, my best friend Sharon's mother died of cancer after a long decline. Instead of going to the funeral in Dallas, I flew out to New Mexico February 24 after a two-day stop in NYC to record demos for the musical with Chris Blacker. This was not an attempt to avoid crowds; I knew Sharon would need the support more when she returned home and was not surrounded by family. I was there for the week to cook and clean and do laundry and watch a kid. I washed my hands obsessively and was careful with tissues and glasses I used, not out of fear of Covid but because I'd been exposed to a lot of people in NYC and then through air travel, and I figured Sharon's immune system would be collapsing from stress, and I didn't want to give her a cold while she was grieving.
While I was in New Mexico, REL (my sister) emailed me that people in Thailand were all wearing masks and asked whether she should wear a mask. I told her that the current guidance was that transmission was through droplets from a symptomatic person, so wash your hands and don't share drinks. But wear a mask anyway because it can't hurt and is a social norm where you are. I also noted that I didn't trust the information I was getting because the organizations one would usually look to did not seem to be acting in a way that was consistent or trustworthy, and there was a lot of racism distorting what was seen as credible on top of that. During this time, Dad was also coordinating with the US State Department and with various airlines to make sure REL and Raiff could get on a flight out of Hong Kong.
On Feburary 29 I flew in to Boston, and I think REL got in on March 1 before immediately leaving for Atlanta, where she lives. On my flight, a seatmate used disinfecting wipes to wipe everything around us down. It was not clear to me whether this was pandemic panic or something she does all the time as a road warrior.
The first week of March, I voted in person and went to a doctor's appointment. On March 7, there started to be reports of contagion at a Biogen conference in Boston. I immediately told my family to assume the virus was in Winchester, our town, where a lot of people work for medical device makers and would have either gone to the conference or been in close contact with someone who had. I didn't go to a public event on Saturday March 7. My parents and the kids did go to church on March 8 but I told them not to hug people and not to take communion.
I did meet up with a few gaming friends on Monday March 9. I did not share food the way I would have usually and doubted my own decision to go. From then on, we would meet remotely. (One of the other members of this group works at the Broad Institute, which does genetic and biomedical research. They switched over in late March to using their equipment to do Covid testing and research.)
Ciro and I agreed to pull the kids out of school on March 12 but we didn't have to because the schools decided to close the same day. Although public guidance was still anti-mask, almost everybody in Winchester started wearing masks when in public. (A very high percentage of the residents of this town work in the medical field - doctors, researchers, drug and device makers. A very high percentage of residents of the town have relatives in either China or Italy.) In the house, we all washed our hands a lot and started wiping down all high-touch surfaces with bleach daily, as well as laundering all clothing after one wearing. I was also washing towels and pillowcases daily.
By April I had shifted to working 55 hour weeks as a captioner instead of 45 hour weeks as a captioner because of how much extra programming we needed to cover - health department press conferences in every state, the absurd presidential breifings when Trump was holding them, and high school and college classes with deaf students in attendance that had now gone remote (making sign interpreters and lip reading less an option). Which means I've gotten to audit a lot of courses at Columbia, among other things. A few competing captioning companies started trying to headhunt me because of the captioner shortage.
We have not really taken any risks since then. During the summer, Ciro did go to some of the Black Lives Matter protests (masked and socially distanced). I picked up a box of books from my friend Molly's parents' house (masked, far apart from each other) and we did watch a movie (Treasure Planet) outdoors with some friends sitting on opposite sides of a yard.
Otherwise I've only left the house for medical appointments and to drop off my ballot for the presidential election, and once to go masked to an empty park and once to walk around the block. Other members of the household have gone grocery shopping. We did get dental cleanings. Ciro does see his personal trainer in a mostly outdoor area, socially distanced, while wearing two facemasks and a face shield.
I already worked at home and Ciro was already a stay-at-home parent. My parents' lifestyles have been more altered; Dad has not been doing Episcopal parish audits or his cataloguing work at the Medford historical society, and Mom has not been going to board meetings or doing charity performances or volunteering at the hospital gift shop (which is closed). Church services have been remote. The choir and boards and adult education classes have been meeting irregularly by web conference. We do not have the usual flow of house guests.
Since September, the kids have been at in-person school two days a week (masked, small learning pods). They are otherwise home. We transferred Nicodemo from his public school to Ilario's public school (as a special needs student, Ilario is not at the closest elementary school, but the one that can best accommodate his learning) so we wouldn't have as many vectors. Ciro drives them instead of putting them on the bus.
By November, we'd finally trained up enough new captioners that I was able to cut back to a normal workweek again, or closer to it. In November and December, we have had a regular flow of workmen on mostly the exterior of the house or in rooms we close off and ventilate, doing various maintenance which was posponed until it couldn't be - the replacement of the smoke detector system, repairs to the boiler and roof, etc.
In late December my supervisor told me to go ahead and start scheduling days off so I don't hit the PTO cap. (Those leaves of absence will be in 2021 but were scheduled In 2020.) Raiff, who has been living in Atlanta with REL, returned to Massachusetts. We are not hanging out, because pandemic. As far as I know, his and REL's belongings are still in China. Ciro's twin brother Antonio, who lives in Italy, did not show up for a phone meeting on Christmas and we have not been able to make contact with him since then. I think it's about 10 days since we last heard from him. We are not sure how concerned to be.
In late January, I think January 20 or 21, my sister flew to southern China, where our friend Raiff taught English, to spend the Lunar New Year holiday with him. On I think January 24, they crossed into Hong Kong for an overnight trip (lunar new year's eve) and then the borders closed. They spent the next several weeks visiting various other East Asian countries, waiting for things to stabilize, unable to return to China, where Raiff's apartment and their belongings were.
In the US and in Asia, it seemed like this might be a China problem, because the government of China has a long history of not being honest about what's up. It was anybody's guess whether they were lying about it being very bad so that they could enact government policies they wanted to enact, or lying about it being safer than it was so they could gain prestige. Chinese friends of mine couldn't tell and neither could journalists who cover China. We knew there was something weird but not in which direction. I was angry that people in Boston were avoiding Lunar New Year celebrations but not Valentine's Day celebrations, for instance. "People wouldn't do this for the flu," I said. "This is about China." I was right that people's behavior was about racism but incorrect that it was like the flu, which is what the WHO was saying at the time.
In early February, there started to be a lot of Covid deaths in Italy, and our friends and relatives there started to go into mandatory lockdowns. A lot of this was dismissed in the US as Italy having a bad health system, but since Ciro and I had lived there we knew this wasn't true. We were hearing direct reports from our people on the ground and were also reading Italian newspapers. All the international health organizations were still saying it was droplet transmission and similar to a bad case of the flu, and that there were no signs of pre-symptomatic contagion.
On February 12, my best friend Sharon's mother died of cancer after a long decline. Instead of going to the funeral in Dallas, I flew out to New Mexico February 24 after a two-day stop in NYC to record demos for the musical with Chris Blacker. This was not an attempt to avoid crowds; I knew Sharon would need the support more when she returned home and was not surrounded by family. I was there for the week to cook and clean and do laundry and watch a kid. I washed my hands obsessively and was careful with tissues and glasses I used, not out of fear of Covid but because I'd been exposed to a lot of people in NYC and then through air travel, and I figured Sharon's immune system would be collapsing from stress, and I didn't want to give her a cold while she was grieving.
While I was in New Mexico, REL (my sister) emailed me that people in Thailand were all wearing masks and asked whether she should wear a mask. I told her that the current guidance was that transmission was through droplets from a symptomatic person, so wash your hands and don't share drinks. But wear a mask anyway because it can't hurt and is a social norm where you are. I also noted that I didn't trust the information I was getting because the organizations one would usually look to did not seem to be acting in a way that was consistent or trustworthy, and there was a lot of racism distorting what was seen as credible on top of that. During this time, Dad was also coordinating with the US State Department and with various airlines to make sure REL and Raiff could get on a flight out of Hong Kong.
On Feburary 29 I flew in to Boston, and I think REL got in on March 1 before immediately leaving for Atlanta, where she lives. On my flight, a seatmate used disinfecting wipes to wipe everything around us down. It was not clear to me whether this was pandemic panic or something she does all the time as a road warrior.
The first week of March, I voted in person and went to a doctor's appointment. On March 7, there started to be reports of contagion at a Biogen conference in Boston. I immediately told my family to assume the virus was in Winchester, our town, where a lot of people work for medical device makers and would have either gone to the conference or been in close contact with someone who had. I didn't go to a public event on Saturday March 7. My parents and the kids did go to church on March 8 but I told them not to hug people and not to take communion.
I did meet up with a few gaming friends on Monday March 9. I did not share food the way I would have usually and doubted my own decision to go. From then on, we would meet remotely. (One of the other members of this group works at the Broad Institute, which does genetic and biomedical research. They switched over in late March to using their equipment to do Covid testing and research.)
Ciro and I agreed to pull the kids out of school on March 12 but we didn't have to because the schools decided to close the same day. Although public guidance was still anti-mask, almost everybody in Winchester started wearing masks when in public. (A very high percentage of the residents of this town work in the medical field - doctors, researchers, drug and device makers. A very high percentage of residents of the town have relatives in either China or Italy.) In the house, we all washed our hands a lot and started wiping down all high-touch surfaces with bleach daily, as well as laundering all clothing after one wearing. I was also washing towels and pillowcases daily.
By April I had shifted to working 55 hour weeks as a captioner instead of 45 hour weeks as a captioner because of how much extra programming we needed to cover - health department press conferences in every state, the absurd presidential breifings when Trump was holding them, and high school and college classes with deaf students in attendance that had now gone remote (making sign interpreters and lip reading less an option). Which means I've gotten to audit a lot of courses at Columbia, among other things. A few competing captioning companies started trying to headhunt me because of the captioner shortage.
We have not really taken any risks since then. During the summer, Ciro did go to some of the Black Lives Matter protests (masked and socially distanced). I picked up a box of books from my friend Molly's parents' house (masked, far apart from each other) and we did watch a movie (Treasure Planet) outdoors with some friends sitting on opposite sides of a yard.
Otherwise I've only left the house for medical appointments and to drop off my ballot for the presidential election, and once to go masked to an empty park and once to walk around the block. Other members of the household have gone grocery shopping. We did get dental cleanings. Ciro does see his personal trainer in a mostly outdoor area, socially distanced, while wearing two facemasks and a face shield.
I already worked at home and Ciro was already a stay-at-home parent. My parents' lifestyles have been more altered; Dad has not been doing Episcopal parish audits or his cataloguing work at the Medford historical society, and Mom has not been going to board meetings or doing charity performances or volunteering at the hospital gift shop (which is closed). Church services have been remote. The choir and boards and adult education classes have been meeting irregularly by web conference. We do not have the usual flow of house guests.
Since September, the kids have been at in-person school two days a week (masked, small learning pods). They are otherwise home. We transferred Nicodemo from his public school to Ilario's public school (as a special needs student, Ilario is not at the closest elementary school, but the one that can best accommodate his learning) so we wouldn't have as many vectors. Ciro drives them instead of putting them on the bus.
By November, we'd finally trained up enough new captioners that I was able to cut back to a normal workweek again, or closer to it. In November and December, we have had a regular flow of workmen on mostly the exterior of the house or in rooms we close off and ventilate, doing various maintenance which was posponed until it couldn't be - the replacement of the smoke detector system, repairs to the boiler and roof, etc.
In late December my supervisor told me to go ahead and start scheduling days off so I don't hit the PTO cap. (Those leaves of absence will be in 2021 but were scheduled In 2020.) Raiff, who has been living in Atlanta with REL, returned to Massachusetts. We are not hanging out, because pandemic. As far as I know, his and REL's belongings are still in China. Ciro's twin brother Antonio, who lives in Italy, did not show up for a phone meeting on Christmas and we have not been able to make contact with him since then. I think it's about 10 days since we last heard from him. We are not sure how concerned to be.