Notes from the 2020 Pandemics

In January 2020, I remember watching videos on Reddit that were coming out of Wuhan China.  I saw people wearing Tyvek suits, masks and shields who were welding apartment doors and building gates shut.  A shrieking woman was pushed into a small compartment of a van, with a door slamming in her face.  I saw people pressing into hospitals, with rows of patients lining the hallway and snaking out the door.  Day by day, I watched these images with horror.  At a funeral for a beloved uncle who was born in China, I mingled with a family member who works for fitbit, and who had just been in China visiting her family, a few hours south of Wuhan.  She reported that the stories and videos were true.

I remember a few days later, I met with Lesley, who co-directs YDEV with me and who is chair of our department, and I asked if she was at all looking into how to transition classes into virtual mode.  I felt a bit crazy asking this question, half jokingly, at the time.

In February, my partner and kids had tickets to go to a big gaming convention in Boston.  This was a family tradition, though I was taking the day to work on my research.  As a family, we brainstormed the pros and cons of going.  The list is still on our fridge, and it looks like this:

In the "go" list, the kids wrote features like, "fun, other people are going, small chance of getting sick, pax is part of the family," and "dice" (to purchase as a keepsake).  In the "not go" list, the kids wrote, "sick" (as in, we could get sick).  As we reflected upon the list, I remember my daughter saying, "Well, I see five or six items on the go side and only one or two on the no go side, so there you have it, it's a go!"  My son laughed and agreed.  My partner and I dryly asked if a single reason -- getting sick and dying -- might be worth more than six or seven or even 100 competing reasons.  This list opened up a bigger conversation about making decisions, and then we problem solved strategies the kids could do to reduce their risk of getting sick (washing their hands, bringing hand sanitizer and wipes, avoiding crowded areas of the convention center).  Masking was not yet a strategy used in the U.S.  The kids and my partner went.  And they were incredibly lucky that the person or people who were going to attend the biogen conference in Boston the next week -- one of the first superspreading events in the U.S. -- either didn't go to PAX or were not yet contagious. 

And then in March everything shut down.  And the school shifted into virtual mode.

I was on sabbatical, and I had been facilitating focus groups of BIPOC YDEV alumni.  I transitioned the groups and interviews into zoom, and hunkered down with my family.  My partner has a job that was partially remote before the pandemic.  He easily transitioned to being completely online.

And my two adolescent kids resumed school online.  The teachers worked hard to make school work.  Without their friends and the structure of school that they knew, the kids became sad, depressed, and sullen.  This was hard to recognize as it gradually got worse day by day.

In September, the school gave families a choice -- go back face to face or attend virtually. My son, in high school, announced it did not matter what my partner or I thought, if the school was open, he was walking to school.  He didn't really care what we thought.  His sister, in middle school, agreed.  As a family, we resurrected the go/not go listing strategy we had practiced back in February.  The kids were very articulate about why they hated virtual school, and all social, emotional, and academic benefits of being in school.  Plus, my son said, going to school would give him a break from constantly being with his parents and sister, which he saw as a huge bonus.  He missed his friends.  He also missed having relationships with adults who were not his parents.  In the end, we came up with a list of strategies the kids could use to be "safer" in school, and the kids went. 

We thought they might make it to early October.  They made it until the week before Thanksgiving, when someone in my daughter's class tested positive and everyone in the class transitioned home.  There has been at least one additional case in the class, and today we have been told everyone in the class will need to be tested this week.  I wonder if the school and state are using this situation as a way to test a group of asymptomatic people to get a "read" on community spread. 

My family has been fortunate in this pandemic situation.  We have a house where we can spread out into separate rooms during the day.  We have a rotating cooking schedule.  Our kids have devices to use when the school has shifted between virtual and face to face classes.  The teachers in my kids' school have been working hard to create learning communities.  My own virtual classes at RIC are not perfect, but they have been much better than I ever anticipated them being.  And after a year long sabbatical, I am really enjoying working with students and being challenged to teach and problem solve in new ways.  And my partner continues to work virtually -- he does energy policy work -- his work continues on and is in more, not less demand.

The health pandemic continues to spread, unequally and also erratically across race, social class, age and other demographic factors and like an uncontrolled wildfire.  It's hard to imagine the scope of suffering right now.

I am in awe of the ways the scientific community has pulled together to understand this virus, to make tests and vaccines, to make recommendations to keep us all safe.  And I am in despair about the tremendous disinformation campaigns that have undermined the messages from scientists, doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals.  In my own extended family, I find myself on opposite sides of belief systems about masking, vaccines, and the parallel racial pandemic.

I wonder what it will take to pull us together and through this wildfire -- is there an opportunity to re-imagine our worlds and possibilities.

Corinne