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Living Through Covid-19

It’s been an interesting eight weeks. My family and I have been making the most of our stay-at-home life. I’ll get to that in a minute. First, let me start with when I saw this all going downhill.

I work for a company that does most of it’s manufacturing in China. Every few weeks we send a team over to check on product quality and make sure production is on schedule. In November of last year factories started to close. This was the first rumblings of coronavirus we began to hear. In a matter of days production came to a stand still. Our company had numerous meetings on product line revisions and timelines. That was November and December.

In January we started to hear that some facilities were opening back up. Luckily we had enough inventory completed before the Chinese new year. We’ll be okay.

Considering all of the horror stories that we heard about the coronavirus I didn’t think that it would be that much of problem here in the U.S. A few years ago when the Ebola outbreak happened we were able to contain anyone who was contaminated. I thought we could do the same with coronavirus. By mid-February we started to hear positive cases in the U.S. and it began to spread. So much for containment.

The first week of March everyone at work was on edge. Chlorox wipes were put on every table, masks were purchased. Everyone listened or read anything related to the virus. Plans were being made to implement social distancing. That included working from home.

I began working  remotely on March 9th. A week later everyone in my division was working remotely.

Governor DeWine closed schools and later put in place the stay-at-home order. Lots of businesses have been shut down. The town I live in is a ghost town except for the occasional person jogging or walking their dog.

Home life has been fun. My wife and I are both working from home and we get to spend time with our son. We go for walks or kick the ball in the yard. We have become pretty good at the online grocery ordering. We know when stores release new times. We work with friends and family and merge orders to get items that were out of stock previously.

I’m about nine weeks in and I’m starting to get restless. I have my mask and I social distance. We have Clorox wipes in the van and we wash our hands whenever we get the mail or touch door knobs. We’re doing everything right but I wouldn’t mind visiting my in-laws or my brother and sister-in-law.

So for now we continue to live the covid-19 life. I am hopeful that this will end soon. All pandemics do. Life will change but I don’t think by much. People will want to go back to what they missed. Businesses will want to get back to full staff. A lot of people have missed out on life milestones. I think that once things get back to normal people will make sure not to take those things for granted.

Those are my thoughts. How are you dealing with the covid-19 life?