I’m planning to do a series of blog posts using photos, videos, etc., to document each day (or maybe eventually each week or whatever) of my experience of the coronavirus crisis and the resulting shelter-in-place situation.
I realize that my individual experience isn’t significant in the grand scheme of things. (Though Becky’s experience, as an E.R. nurse, is far more notable!) But, the relative insignificance is sort of the point. I’m not really doing this for a broader audience, not primarily. Mainly I’m doing it to document for myself what these days were like for me/us, and what we did (and witnessed) as a family while the crisis was unfolding, lest those specific memories get subsumed eventually into a broader general narrative about this moment in history.
Sometimes, a given day’s documentation may also include a few embedded tweets, or screenshots I took that day, to put things in a broader context — but mostly, this will be about the experience of one man and one family in Denver.
This post is a little different, though. This is the “prequel,” if you will, before our stay-at-home period began. So it’s mostly tweets and screenshots.
I’m starting with Wednesday and Thursday, March 11-12, which I’m collectively calling “Day 0” of the Loy family’s “Pandemic Lockdown” (i.e., the period when at least some members of the family stayed at home from normal activities, like work, school, etc., because of the pandemic). Basically, these two days are like the action-packed prequel immediately before my “sheltering in place” began.
On with the prequel…
Wednesday, March 11
Wednesday was the day COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic, and the day after Colorado Governor Jared Polis declared an emergency.
Even so, it began with the kids’ school ostensibly continuing as normal. This was our third-grader’s adorable outfit for “80s day” of school spirit week:
Denver Public Schools kept issuing statements indicating that schools would remain open. But we were skeptical. Becky (who, as an E.R. nurse, had been monitoring COVID-19 closely for some time) had been warning for several days that school would probably be cancelled soon, At home, we started openly musing about the likelihood of an imminent move to online learning — probably sometime the following week, we thought.
Our seventh-grader later reported that, at her middle school, when she and her classmates “informed” their teachers that school would close soon, some teachers scoffed. (In this instance, the kids would be proven right.)
The first school closure came Wednesday morning — a sign of things to come, and soon.
“So it begins” was right — less than 36 hours later, the closure of the entire school system would be announced. But I’ll come back to that later.
Just as the kids went to school as usual Wednesday, I went to work — though not quite as usual. Typically I commute via light rail, and I had done so on Monday and Tuesday. But by Wednesday, that was starting to feel stupid and reckless, so I drove to work for the sake of social distancing.
Also, there was lots of hand-washing.
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear by early Wednesday that all sorts of normal activities were in jeopardy. Like, for instance, my favorite annual sporting event, and a highlight of my calendar every year since I was 9 years old — the NCAA Tournament:
Ever since Becky raised the issue during a memorable dog walk the previous weekend (during which she got me to understand how serious and imminent this coronavirus problem in the U.S. really was), I had slowly come around to the realization that March Madness was at serious risk — notwithstanding the scorn heaped on Dan Wolken when he urged its cancellation Tuesday morning.
On Wednesday, the NCAA tried to chart a middle course, with orders and announcements Wednesday afternoon indicating that games would be played in empty arenas:
But I increasingly thought it was possible, if not likely, that the tournament would instead be cancelled altogether. In large part, I came to this conclusion after a Chris Hayes tweet saying the U.S. was 10 days behind Italy inspired me to make a spreadsheet testing that claim Wednesday afternoon.
Indeed, when I saw just how bad things were “on pace” to get in the U.S. by Selection Sunday (then 4 days away) and the opening weekend of the tournament (8-11 days away), I moved into the “more likely than not it’ll be cancelled” camp. I even interrupted #Twitterless2020 to tweet about it:
Wednesday evening
When I came home from work, I was unplugged from the news for a short while, until — in one of my big “where were you?” moments of this crisis — I glanced at my phone while taking out the trash, and saw a breaking-news alert saying the NBA had suspended its season.
In that moment, I pretty much knew: the NCAA Tournament was doomed. And, more broadly, the scale of what was coming began, I think, to sink in a bit more.
I immediately turned around, walked back in the house, and told the kids about the NBA suspension and the European travel ban. (In response, the 12-year-old told me that Tom Hanks had tested positive for coronavirus, having seen it on Discord or TikTok or something.)
Some more screenshots from those remarkable minutes:
Things were also moving quickly on the school-cancellation front, as the Twitter feed of school board member Tay Anderson made clear by Wednesday evening.
As late as midday Tuesday, Anderson had sounded downright dismissive of the idea of a citywide school closure:
Even after the news about Cory Elementary, he pretty much stuck to the “business as usual” line:
But, within a matter of hours on Wednesday, his tone began to change:
And change even more:
By Wednesday evening, some 30 hours after saying “ALL schools will remain open and we will continue business as usual,” Anderson was calling for an emergency board meeting:
I saw the letter demanding an emergency board meeting on my phone while in the garage to take out the trash (immediately after the NBA announcement), further cementing my understanding of how fast things were accelerating.
Back in the house, I read Anderson’s series of tweets to the kids, explaining that I was struck by the rapid change in tone from “business as usual” to “emergency meeting.” I had previously assumed school might stay in session for another week or so, but when our 10-year-old asked me that night to predict what would be the first day of the closure, I considered it for a few moments, and then said: “If you want me to predict one specific day… I’ll say Monday.”
I solidified that prediction in a Facebook post Wednesday night:
I would be wrong about the Democratic debate, but exactly right about the rest of it. (And about my Tuesday-night prediction of the number of cases in Colorado by the week’s end.)
Thursday, March 12
Thursday morning, while walking to my office from the cheap parking lot 15 minutes away, I couldn’t resist: I just had to post my Lord of the Rings-referencing tweet about the NCAA Tournament, before it (as I was virtually certain it would) became obsolete within a few hours.
A short while later, having now “cheated” on #Twitterless2020 twice in two days, I bit the bullet and decided to “suspend” it altogether:
Needless to say, I was right about there not being a Dance. First came the firehose of conference tournament cancellations:
The NCAA’s official announcement didn’t come until later in the afternoon, but it was clear where this was headed:
And then, the inconceivable became the inevitable:
Here are a few more screenshots I took that day:
Oh, and apropos of nothing, here’s the tweet of the year:
Anyway… it’s just about time to wrap up this post and start the next one, because my “Pandemic Lockdown” was actually about to begin.
I’ll leave you on a cliffhanger:
To be continued in the next post…