I manage a produce department at a grocery store and was always front and center with the hordes of people coming in. At the start of the pandemic my wife and newborn were stuck at home, so even if I wasn’t worried about myself, there was always this background anxiety that I was going to bring it home and potentially cause the death of my wife or daughter. Any illness we did get was especially weird or aggressive, and always thought “Ah, shit, this is it.”, but somehow never was. To this day we’ve somehow never tested positive for COVID, though I know statistically we’ve probably had it.
Those early days were bizarre, though. I remember ominously gathering in the stockroom at work shortly before things started getting weird. The owner explained what was going on, how it would change things and what we would be doing differently going forward. He predicted all of the shortages, especially toilet paper. Funny enough, we always had a huge supply of that shit downstairs, but idiots would buy it up so fast it always looked like there was a shortage. You can only fit like 3-6 packages in a large shelf space at any given time. People would show up before the stock guy could get more out and wind up depleting all of the napkins and paper towels instead. Bet their assholes felt great.
The best were people who bought up a bunch of Lysol, thinking that shit was like a convenient and instant disinfectant. Yeah, if you want to spray down every inch of your home and leave it sit for thirty minutes…
Strange days… Though I suppose at the heart of it, stupid or not, everyone was just worried about their families.
At my grocery store people would put everything they bought into one of those thin plastic produce bags and then just pour in hand sanitizer and shake it all over everything in the bag.
Weird time, but I’m glad they took it seriously… some customers angrily did not
If I had to eat out, favoring hot, greasy food over cool, dry food. The logic was that the viral walls of Covid weren’t actually that strong and were less likely to survive wet, oily, slightly acidic and hot foods. That’s if I ate out. Really tried not to and just made healthy foods at home.
I also preferred conformable work/mechanic gloves over latex gloves. I figured being able to wear them the whole time would be safer then getting annoyed at sweat buildup and trying to take them off constantly. Same goes with wearing a full face shield over a mask sometimes. A lot of infections were from getting spite in the eyes without knowing it.
I work outside and by myself most of the time, so my day to day life didn’t really change at all. Got vaxxed and boasted when available and never caught covid once.
edit: oh, just remembered what my friend’s plan was. His wife was going to make fabric masks with pockets that accepted swiffer pads. I told him that it was a terrible idea and found him the SDS for those thing which listed skin irritation as a possible. Dumbass was going to be breathing that shit in and selling them.
The only thing that really changed for me was that I wore a mask when going to a store or something. I didn’t need one at work since I worked alone and outside at the time.
The one time I thought I had caught COVID, it turned out to be just a gnarly case of strep throat. Never once lost my sense of smell or taste from strep throat before, but 2 home tests and 1 actual doctor test all showed negative for COVID so… 🤷🏻♂️
I then had an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin given to me for the strep throat so that was fun.
this is so fucking wild to me, here in sweden we just put up hand sanitizer bottles in stores and plexiglass in front of the cashiers, and told everyone to pwease keep their distance and not use public transport (and then acted surprised when the public transport use decreased)…
there was a very common joke along the lines of “man i can’t wait until the 2-meter social distancing is over, so we can go back to standing 3 meters apart!”
All sorts of dumb shit happened in North America. A favourite of mine was people leaving their mail in the mailbox a few days so to ensure the germs died before picking it up?
At the very beginning I woke up one morning and could not use my right hand, the tendons were so painful. I’ve had a lot of trouble with my hands, but they had been better, so I was pretty concerned, until I got ready to go out and realized that I had gained a habit of death gripping the small spray bottle of rubbing alcohol I’d been keeping in my right hand jacket pocket. I’d been spraying everything (outside my house) before I touched it, like door handles and such, but just clinging to the bottle for dear life even when not in use.
I live in San Francisco, where we shut down IMMEDIATELY. It was actually in Feb, not March. Everyone was like, well, that’s probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.
Not much, I’m already kinda germophobic so it was easy to treat every surface as dirty. And now that people stopped cleaning everything, it’s easy to see that everything IS dirty. Still haven’t caught it lol
The first 6 months when we were too scared to go anywhere or do anything, we saved like $1000/month. I proceeded to learn nothing and we went back to max spending as soon as scientifically acceptable.
One of the biggest lessons I learned was just how much goddamn money most people spend eating out and stuff. My finances did not change because I budget to the bone.
My wife got upset with me for getting coffee at the drive thru.
I refused to stop though, told her if that thing was going to spread via someone passing a coffee cup thru a window we’re all fucked anyways and I may as well enjoy my coffee on occasion.
I used to make my husband text me pictures of him in a mask at the grocery store just slightly before masks became mandatory. I swiped some from work just before things got rolling and we began wearing them. Probably my best idea.
We didn’t dare eat take-out. We cooked every meal we ate for over two years. That got old after a couple months, so two years kinda sucked. We spent so much money on take-out after we got vaccinated!
I did this, lol. But I learned that produce tastes so much better after soaking in water with a dash of vinegar, and still do this with all of my produce.
I remember using ATM’s for the first time ever (because bank branches were closed) and using our stock of nitrile single use gloves to touch anything.
I also remember still going to work as a machine operator and being forced to wear the paper mask on top of my existing eye and hearing protection… my safety glasses would fog almost constantly and I scrapped at least a few parts cuz I couldn’t see what the fuck was going on and they wouldn’t let us take any safety gear off (even for a second) unless we left the shop floor. Good times.
My church bestie and I always sit together and when we pass the peace and hug and shake hands, she always immediately puts sanitizer on my hands and hers after without even asking. She’s the best.
I think a lot of that depends on your viewpoint and attitude. I will admit that I got grocery delivery for a few months and would actually sanitize the packaging before bringing it inside. I chuckle about it now and think I was maybe going a bit overboard - but like you said, the times were so uncertain for many - especially during the beginning.
For a few months basically no one knew how it spread. I look back and think about how it could be seen as overboard, but being cautious and careful is more important in a time when something like Covid was quickly spreading and had these wildly different experiences for people. Especially the first alpha variant which seemed to either kill people, or cause them to not smell/taste and have memory issues. I wasn’t going to fuck with that, and still don’t want to.
Also, some forget, but there was a lot of videos coming out of China where it started with people running around seemingly trying to infect others and felt very zombie-esque.
Yep. There were reports that it could live on plastic surfaces for over a week.
Is it silly in hindsight knowing everything we do today? Sure. But if a new epidemic spreads rapidly again before we have any reliable info on it, I’m going back to wiping things down and washing my hands after touching anything.
Same… we’d wipe down our groceries, and anything delivered by mail or UPS would sit on our back porch for a few days before we’d bring it in the house. Was it necessary? Probably not, but our house never got sick - at least not until 2023. So for the next pandemic I won’t mind being overly cautious again.
Yeah I remember it was months in before studies started coming out that it didn’t spread via surfaces. I distinctly remember thinking “shit what am I supposed to do with all these Clorox wipes??”
I wish that message had gotten around a little faster. By summer or fall of 2020, we had a pretty good idea that covid didn’t live well on surfaces, but we still had people gobbling up isopropyl alcohol and causing a shortage. Worse, a few companies made hand sanitizer with methanol as a cheap way to keep up with demand.
Meet less people, wear a mask, wash your hands - please yes
Wash your keys, buy delivery but then put it in the oven (including packaging) - I won’t stop you from having fun, but it was not exactly required to stay safe.
We know that now, but at the time there was less information about how the virus spread and, I believe more importantly than the short term dangers, the long term effects of infection.
Of course one could think that it is silly to go to the extra effort of sanitizing your take-out when cooking at home was an option, but I don’t know their situation enough to make that judgment.
Yeah, you didn’t know this back then. Maybe you did if you were a healthcare professional or a specialist in virology. In the US, all we had to go off of was the CDC, who are supposed to be the apex specialists, fighting with Trump who just had gut feelings about drinking bleach to kill the virus, and a literal ocean of misinformation and horrifying lockdown/mass casualty stories coming out of China.
It was clear that nobody actually knew what was up, and that public safety advice was biased through this filter intended to get people back to work to save the economy. Someone at some point decided that X number of people might die to save X percent of the economy and apparently we were supposed to be okay with that?
I got to work from home, I got to actually invest in my living space. I started tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive. I cooked more. I invested into learning new skills. I spent almost zero time communiting anywhere. I prioritized my health, getting enough sleep. I didn’t even get as much as a runny nose for like 2 years.
tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive
Generally I don’t shill online but my town just gots its first microbrewery when COViD hit so when I found out they were doing takeout, you better believe I spread the word far and wide. It worked: that business survived.
Of course I accidentally spread negative word about a great Pakistani kebab place, so I shut the hell up and went there every week for the summer. It became a thing with my family, when you couldn’t go places with people and restaurants were closed. We’d walk down to the center of town, order through their app, send one person in to pick up, and have dinner outside on the town common
Yeah I’m pretty nostalgic for it too, sans the whole potential death part haha. I cooked constantly, worked from home, and played classic wow with my homies. It was awesome.
I remember that I got to wfh so I had no commute, and people left me alone to actually do my job. All the orgs I keep busy with were shut down, so I finally got to rest.
But my anxiety was through the fucking roof because every 2 weeks, either my work or some other group would be like “let’s plan a get-together now that COVID is almost over!”
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