Coronapocalypse: the prequel

I just realized that I asked Z to keep a journal during the Coronapocalypse, but I haven't been doing that myself. I just tried to answer a question on Twitter about when the schools shut down here, and I realized I'm already losing track of the timing of events. So, here I am, I guess.

The first US case of covid-19 was diagnosed on January 19, but my experience of this whole medical situation started the previous morning, when my mother had a stroke.

She and my dad are staying with us right now, as they do for usually around four months a year.

She woke up feeling a little off-kilter on the 19th, but it wasn't until she tried to ask Z to take the dog outside that she realized she couldn't make her mouth make words correctly. She knew it was a stroke right away, and I immediately threw her and Dad in the car and sped off to our closest hospital, Evergreen.

The ER there was amazing -- extremely speedy, very caring, checking in with her often even while the man screaming obscenities in the next room over was requiring a lot of extra staff.

What has really stayed with me is that the neurologist asked questions, sped her off for brain imaging, and then immediately started reassuring us about the financial implications of having brought her in to an out-of-network hospital. What a world we live in!

As he predicted, our insurance company transferred her to different hospital as soon as she was stable -- the Providence hospital up in Everett. That seems nuts to me. They had an ambulance transport her 40 miles just so she could get the exact same care from slightly different people, for paperwork reasons. Dad talked to the ambulance driver on the way there, and learned that that's ALL this particular ambulance does -- no rescue calls, just transferring patients between hospitals.

We were really lucky. Her symptoms went away quickly on their own, even as the imaging continued to show an evolving stroke. And she got to go home after 24 hours of observation. While there is visible damage to her brain, the only actual function she's lost is handwriting. Since she already gave up calligraphy when her arthritis got bad, that isn't a very disturbing loss to her. (Losing the ability to knit, on the other hand, would have been devastating.)

So that threw the whole year into disarray. They'd been about to fly down to see my sister in California for a couple months, but apparently you can't fly right after a stroke. So they started making plans for my my sister and (separately) my uncle and aunt to come visit us here.

Aaaaaaand then the coronavirus arrived.

And it arrived right where we were.

The day after mum checked out of the Proidence hospital in Everett, that man with the first US case of covid checked in.

And by Feb 10, people at the LifeCare nursing home in my own neighborhood -- south Juanita in Kirkland -- started falling ill.

I'll pick the story up there next time.

Coronapocalypse

My last post got us up to the COVID-19's arrival in my neighborhood in early February.

Unfortunately, nobody knew what was happening for at least three weeks. By Feb 10, staff at LifeCare were noticing that more patients and staff than usual seemed to have some sort of winter flu. Within a few weeks, the firefighters noticed the uptick in 911 calls from there. But because no one knew COVID was already endemic in the Seattle area, no one even thought of connecting it to the recently named COVID-19.

Then, the last few days of February, things started happening really quickly.

Feb. 27 and 28, a nearby school was closed because a staff member had been exposed to COVID-18 via a family member who'd been in Asia.

Then, the evening of Feb. 28, it was announced that two King County residents were positive despite not having traveled overseas or been in contact with anyone who had. That means the dreaded community spread had begun. The governor declared a state of emergency.

I think it's fair to say pandemonium broke out. On the 29th, which was a Saturday, everyone in the whole Seattle area hit the grocery stores and started buying out everything, especially TP. I still don't get why TP! The local Costco had a line to get in. In Issaquah, they had workers come out from their corporate offices to try to manage the crowd.

Around lunchtime that same day, we learned someone had just died of COVID-19 at my local hospital, the same one whose ER I'd taken Mum to. In addition, we learned that a nursing home in my neighborhood, LifeCare Center, had a major outbreak: 27 of the 180 residents had COVID symptoms, as well as about 25 of the staff.

I live about a mile away from each of those facilities. One of my friends used to work at the LifeCare, and one of my friends works at Evergreen Health.


The LifeCare was put under quarantine, as were the sick staff members and about two dozen firefighters who had tended to them. They actually closed down one of the local fire houses to house the quarantined firefighters. They were supposed to be tested immediately, but it took forever. Eventually about 20-35 of the residents died, I believe. Maybe that's out of date.

You know, I really thought "FBI arrests literal Nazi" would be the worst news out of my neighborhood this week, but nope. https://t.co/QyYEpDCQGL

— MJ {quarantine day 17} (@toorsdenote) March 1, 2020

The first week of March, life slowly ground to a halt.

On March 1, my parents' church cancelled communion, but weirdly not coffee hour.

March 2 was, unbeknownst to me, my last day volunteering at the food bank. The outbreak was the only thing people talked about. We all washed our hands frequently, while singing the alphabet song, as recommended. The volunteer supervisor circulated, wiping down carts and door handles. And already, there was only about half as much bread as usual. The food bank relies largely on grocery store donations of unsold, near-expiry food, and now no food gets to expiry without selling.

That same day, Z's best friend had to leave school partway through because she was so terrified by COVID that she started feeling sick to her stomach. It's really rough explaining this stuff to kids.

Every day the school district sent out a long email explaining why they weren't shutting down, even though the next district north already had. They were really weighing carefully whether kids were at more risk in school, or in whatever places they'd be if they weren't in school. That's a really tough decision, and I'm glad I didn't have to make it for other people's kids!

They did say they'd excuse any absences if parents wanted to keep their kids home, and about a quarter of Z's classmates instantly disappeared. On the 5th they recommended we keep our kids home if we had at-risk household members, so we started homeschooling Z on the 6th. The district didn't shut down till the 12th.



Since then, we've been pretty much on shelter-in-place protocol, although they weren't calling it that yet.

J gets groceries every 5-6 days, and we now have a system worked out with some friends where we buy for them and vice versa, so we can all go a little less often. We leave the food on each other's porches and chat at a distance.

We kept a few of the medical appointments we already had: the dog had his pre-neutering bloodwork, but not the actual neutering. Mum snuck in her second cataract surgery before they shut down elective surgeries, and thank goodness for that because she couldn't read with only one eye fixed. (We all had to get screened for COVID before we could enter the hospital for her surgery, and carry yellow cards that said we didn't have symptoms!)

Other than that, we only go out to walk the dog, without interacting with anyone else. The dog has gotten to be more and more of a butt as time goes on — desperate to approach and play with any other dog he sees — so today instead of walking him I tried to teach him how to fetch in the back yard. We got as far as the concept of running after the ball, but he's not so keen on the bringing-it-back part.

The school is theoretically supposed to reopen on April 25, but none of us believe it will. Z is enjoying homeschooling (as am I, honestly), but it's slowly starting to sink in that they'll probably never put on the long-rehearsed school play, sign each other's yearbooks, and so on.

A really wonderful part of this experience has been involving the whole family in homeschooling Z. It hadn't really struck me as unusual before that we all have at least some teaching background. Right now J is taking charge of math (typically fun advanced topics), my mother is teaching Latin to both Z and Z's cousin in England, my father is teaching a variety of topics like weather and tree identification, and I am doing a big science project every afternoon.