When was the first day you realized that COVID-19 was going to disrupt our lives — even though we didn’t know until later how long and hard that disruption would be?
In its anniversary package, GBH News decided on March 10, 2020, the day that Gov. Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency. I wrote about covering a COVID news conference in Mendocino County, California, on March 5.
For me, though, the real anniversary is today. On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, we learned at a faculty meeting that classes would go remote the following day. That evening, the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks announced that he had COVID.
And in what would prove to be our final in-person meeting, my graduate ethics students and I watched Donald Trump deliver an Oval Office address that night about the coronavirus that was so unnerving it sent the Dow futures tumbling.
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We had started a planned one-month trip to Florida starting the last week of February. We were in a condo in Sanibel with our son daughter-in-law and grandson. We were going out to the beach, going to restaurants. On 3/11, my son and I went to a Twins-Braves spring training game. No masks, no distancing, though we were washing our hands a lot. After Trump’s speech, my research biologist daughter-in-law’s reaction was, “We are SO screwed.”
We stayed through Saturday, then bagged the rest of the Florida time and high-tailed it north. The traffic on I-95 north was very heavy, even later in the evening. On Tuesday 3/17, we drove through NYC and CT without stopping. Very spooky. Got home and stayed there.