Our Life Since COVID-19 Hit

I hesitated writing a whole blog post about this topic.  At first, I thought I could sum it up in a few sentences in a Facebook post.  But after some thinking, it seemed like maybe I have a lot to say.  2020 started off as a sprint.  The same day the kids returned to school, after Winter Break ended, I flew off to California to start my new job.  I had to be there 2 weeks, and halfway thru the second week, the kids and Eric flew to Florida to visit family.  I flew from California to Florida to join them at the end of my training, and we spent a lovely few days visiting.  Then we flew home to Korea and within 24 hours of our return, we turned around and left again for our trip to Laos.  While there, though, something called the coronavirus hit China and all of a sudden it got scary to be in an airport where people from China might also be passing through.  We wore masks in the airport and on the airplane.  Once home though, the virus seemed more removed.  We watched it spread from a healthy distance.  There were only a handful of cases in Korea at this point.

Some brilliant person in Korea created a website really early on https://coronamap.site/.  I was monitoring it daily, because what made it brilliant was not only that it showed where each patient with coronavirus was, but also where they had been.  It tracked their movements with days and times, so we could all be aware of how close it was getting.

Okay, so if you’re keeping track, the kids had attended school exactly 8 days in 2020 before we did our traveling.  Then one day between Florida and Laos.  Upon returning, they attended school only 5 more days before coronavirus got too close for comfort and they closed the school.  So, that’s 14 days in school until then.  So, what happened to make the school close?  Patient #19 (that’s the 19th patient in all of Korea to test positive for coronavirus) went shopping at our local mall.  We learned of this after the medical staff interviewed him to find out where he’d been in the previous days before getting tested.  So, our mall shut down to get decontaminated and it was determined that every school in our little area should close for the remainder of the 14-days counting from the day he was at the mall.  Fourteen days is the magic number of the incubation period where, if any of us had caught it, we would start showing symptoms. During this time, we started ticking off everything that had been affected due to the virus.  Volleyball matches cancelled, our fitness center closed, Eric had to get his temperature scanned every morning when he got to work, the ice rink closed for the season, and the community center closed.

Going out for an evening walk

Okay, so how did this all make us feel?  At first?  Relieved, because I had been to that mall with the kids the same exact day the patient #19 had, only about 4 hours earlier, so we had just missed him.  Also, we felt scared and exposed.  Like, all of a sudden, it could be anywhere.  Now, to be clear, we had worn masks to the mall, because we knew the coronavirus was about, but that had been Eric’s insistence.  At that point, I was just still in the mindset of checking the air quality, and since we had planned on driving to the mall, I didn’t think the air quality was bad enough to warrant wearing masks.  But Eric had texted me, after I had driven away, and strongly encouraged me to wear masks.  So, I turned the car around and went back for them.  Man, am I glad I did.  It was like something in the back of his mind had told him that it was important enough that day to ask us to turn around and go back for the masks.  And that was the day patient #19 showed up in Songdo.  There was now a little dot on the map right in our town.  I don’t believe in coincidences.

Hanging at the mall

Okay, so we had 6 days off school that first time they closed.  They tried something new, called distance learning, that threw us all for a loop.  I was working from home at this point.  So, here I am trying to get in 8 hours of work online, at the same time the kids are experiencing this thing called distance learning, that was a brand new concept for everyone involved.  The teachers were making it up as they went along, and although we were grateful for their flexibility and willingness to adapt quickly, it was also hugely overwhelming.  It felt like I had 2 full time jobs.  All of us moms nearly lost our minds that week.  There was new technology to learn, new software, new apps, and a mountain of emails coming in at rapid speed.  The kids were so stressed out.  I was so stressed out.  There was crying, there was screaming, there were tantrums.  It was awful, I’m not going to lie.

At the same time all this was happening, Maya was due to have an old friend fly in from Spain to visit.  Her parents went back and forth on whether or not it was safe to send her, but they did decide in the end that it was safe enough and she flew by herself to Korea.  She spent her first weekend back at our place.  We didn’t leave the apartment much.  Everything was closed anyways.  The Korean government has a wonderful ability to text all of its residents with Emergency Alerts at any time of day.  In the past, they had been used to alert us of bad air days and preventive measures to keep the  pollution levels down (carpool, take public transport, etc.).  But now they were sending us messages about all the COVID-19 patients and where they were from and what hospital they were sent to.  In addition, they were sending us messages, sometimes several times a day, with reminders to wash our hands, stay in our apartments, and wear masks if we absolutely had to go outside.  I decided they must be serious.  We kept our excursions outside very brief and always just to the park where we could stretch our legs and get our blood flowing a bit.

So, the 14 days ended, and school reopened.  But, they had rules about who could come.  No one who had visited China or Hong Kong in the previous 14 days could come.  Those rules would morph to include other locations and longer time periods, but you get the idea.  It was the first introduction of the idea of self-quarantine.  This concept that if you know you were in an area that coronavirus was also known to be, you should stay home for 14 days until you knew that you didn’t have it.

Scrabble is just one of our stay-at-home entertainments

With the kids back at school, I started to wonder how long it would last.  I wanted to give my feedback to the school, so if they had to repeat this distance learning thing, it might go better the second time.  Apparently, every parent had an opinion to share and they were all emailing the school. At this point, I started feeling bad for the school and the teachers.  They had really tried their best and everyone had an opinion of how they could have done it better.  It was not something that could be easily solved.  The whole attitude of the school is group learning, collaboration, exploratory learning, and experimentation.  How could they do that remotely?  The only good thing they had going for them was that every kid had a device and access to the internet.  So, they could easily communicate with the kids, as long as we all could keep up with the technology.  It didn’t matter, I dreaded the idea of having to do it again.  I’m talking extreme dread.

During this week back at school, the numbers of patients were doubling daily.  It went from 28 to 52 to 104 to 230 to 500 to 1000.  It was nuts.  The kids had to wash their hands every time they changed classrooms at school.  The teachers had them wipe their desks down several times a day.  There were constant reminders to cough or sneeze into your elbow, etc.  We got hyper vigilant about the kids washing their hands as soon as they got home and stressed that they should not drink from the same cups or water bottles.  We wore masks everywhere.  Eric had to start wearing his mask all day long at work.  I barely left the apartment.  Amazingly, that weekend, Maya was allowed to go to a volleyball match in Seoul, with the caveat that no spectators were allowed in and all athletes had to have their temperatures taken before they were allowed in.  We made her wear her mask on the bus ride into Seoul and anytime she wasn’t actually playing.  Willow also had a Saturday day-long rehearsal for their school musical.  She had missed quite a few rehearsals from our earlier travels and needed the time to get back into the swing of it all.  But, by Sunday night, school decided to close again.  This time for 2 weeks.  For those keeping track, they had now only attended school a total of 19 days in 2020.

What caused this extreme uptick in cases?  A 61-year-old lady in Daegu who, although symptomatic, chose to attend church services 4 times, before getting tested.  And this was not a normal church.  Apparently, her church likes everyone to sit on the floor, knee to knee, and their services gather up to 1000 people at a time.  And the pastor encourages you to come even when you’re sick.  So, thanks to this one lady, there was a huge outbreak of cases in Daegu.  But not just Daegu, because one of the services she attended was a gathering of members from around the country.  So, those folks went home and spread it in their towns too.  And how did this make me feel?  PISSED OFF.  How could this woman not realize the potential harm she had caused?  Knowing there was a highly contagious disease spreading like wildlife, and knowing she had the symptoms, she still went to church???  I’m sorry, but no.  I wanted her arrested.  As it turns out, the pastor of her church has been arrested.  And charged with murder!  Mostly because he didn’t reveal all the names of everyone in the church immediately, which subsequently obstructed the medical community from reaching them quickly and establishing a quarantine to keep it from spreading.  As a result, people had died.

Our kids attending church online

Around this time, Eric and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary.  We wanted to celebrate, but I wasn’t sure we should go out.  We hadn’t eaten out for weeks and had avoided all public areas where people gathered.  Was it irresponsible of us to have a date night in public?  In the end, we picked a restaurant and decided to go for it.  We took a taxi and wore masks in the backseat.  The restaurant was empty.  The only people there were the workers, and I think there were only 3.  We had the entire place to ourselves.  This was a real sign of how effective the government’s warnings had been.  No one was going out.  I felt relief that at least we could eat without fear of catching it from other patrons.

The only safe way to kiss

So, distance learning started again.  This time around it seemed there were some positive changes which kept it from being the stressful, traumatic experience the first time around was.  It was far from  perfect, but they were constantly making adjustments, and so were we.  However, knowing that we had 2 weeks to get through, we all started getting lazy.  The kind of lazy that makes you not change your clothes for several days in a row.  We still got up at 6am, when Eric got up to go to work, and we still went to bed at 9pm, but our physical activity level dropped to zilch.  Lack of inertia ground us to a halt.  The number on the bathroom scale ticked slowly up.   Flannel pajama pants became the outfit of choice.  Meanwhile, I became obsessed with reading the news.  I also checked that coronamap website many times a day.  I just watched the numbers get bigger and bigger.  It was like watching a train wreck, but I couldn’t look away.

Willow in a Zoom meeting with her teacher online

Charlie doing his math assignment.  He writes it down, then later takes a pic and uploads it to his teacher.

Our weekend bike ride to finally get some exercise

February ended, and March began.  Normally, turning the page on the wall calendar to a new month is an exciting thing.  So many events to look forward to: volleyball games, rock climbing, the school musical, family swim time, Charlie’s class hosting the assembly, spring break.  Only this time, it was different.  As we looked at all the events that had been written down, we realized they had all been cancelled.  None of those things would happen.  For the first time ever, we were staring at a month of nothing, nothing but sitting in our apartment.  It was very sobering.  Oh, did I mention that the school decided to stay closed through spring break, and not reconvene until March 30th?  That is an additional 3 weeks, on top of the 2 weeks it said originally.

A few realizations came to me, while staring at the number of cases getting bigger and bigger, now over 7,000.  First of all, Korea has tested more than 140,000 people for the COVID-19.  They have the capacity to test 10,000 a day with their invention of drive-thru testing centers.  The driver stays in their car and gets tested through the window.  So, the realization is that, of course, the more people you test, the more confirmed patients you will have.  If you don’t test, you won’t find any patients.  This makes many people wonder what the real counts are in other countries that are not testing in such high numbers.

The other reason so many people are coming forward for testing is that it is free! And there are no questions asked.  They will test you whether or not you are part of the national healthcare system, whether or not you are even a documented resident.  They are more concerned with finding the people with COVID-19 and getting them quarantined, than rounding up illegal immigrants.

And that begs the question as to why the death count is so low?  I have a few guesses, but my first guess has to do with the rapid speed at which the medical community interviews any new patients discovered and then tracks down every person they have been in contact with since they contracted it.  They broadcast the person’s location history on every major news network and local government website and social media outlet.  Everyone knows where this person went, where they ate, where they shopped, what church they attended, where they live, where they work, how they travel (train, bus, car) and every person they have interacted with, including how they probably caught it.  And then all of those people who read/hear these announcements, and think they might have crossed paths with that person, go and get tested immediately.

The second potential reason the death rate is so low, is that there is universal healthcare and the hospitals have really gotten organized quickly.  There are separate ‘safe hospitals’ for those folks who are not sick with COVID-19, so they can get treated with whatever else ails them without fear of catching COVID-19 in the hospital!  They are separating the COVID-19 patients entirely from the rest of the community.  And how do they know some random person coming to a ‘safe hospital’ doesn’t have COVID-19?  They take your temperature at the door, interview you for symptoms, and where you’ve been.  Have you been to one of the hotspots?  Have you been exposed?  If you answer yes to any of those questions, they take you off to the side and get you tested.

I look now at the statistics for Italy and Iran and I think why are their numbers so high?  Not necessarily the number of patients, but the number of deaths?  Overall, every other country appears to have a higher death rate than Korea.  This is largely due to the fact that those countries have simply tested fewer patients, so the math is just dividing the deaths by a small number of patients.  But also, I don’t think those other countries understand the value of what Koreans are doing: the practice of social distancing, which the entire nation has been encouraged to put into practice since the beginning of this.  It is what we are doing by staying in our apartments and avoiding public gatherings.  We are limiting our exposure to others.  We can’t get sick if we don’t interact with anyone.

This brings me to my final point.  While it is true that social distancing can be boring and isolating, (even if you have a family, seeing the same 4 people every day, all day long, is not the same as public social interaction.) it is the best thing for us.  Truly, we are so grateful and feel so blessed to be where we are right now.  I don’t think that I would feel safer anywhere else on the planet right now.  We have a roof over our heads, food in the pantry and fridge/freezer, and we are all healthy.  We take our vitamins, wear masks if/when we go outside, and wash our hands many times a day.  We also are extremely blessed to be able to have a nanny/housekeeper that comes every weekday afternoon to help me manage my ‘2’ full time jobs (the real one, and the homeschooling one).  She keeps the house from falling apart.  Without her, I would have lost my marbles by now, for sure.

Climbing the walls, literally

With a whole month ahead of us, we have challenged the kids to pick up a new hobby, learn a new skill, try something new.  It only takes 21 days to form a new habit.  What should we choose?  What would you do if you had a month in your house?  What project would you take on?

Maya is carving a block of plaster of Paris into a fox.